
Class. 

Book_ 



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CiQEYRIGHT DEPOSm 



A SERVICE OF LOVE IN 
WAR TIME 

AMERICAN FRIENDS RELIEF 
WORK IN EUROPE, 1917-1919 



BY 

RUFUS M. JONES 

Author of "The Inner Life," 
"The World Within," etc. 




Jl3eto gork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1920 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1920, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



JUN 161920 g)(.,^g^j^29 



^V' -, \ 



A SERVICE OF LOVE IN 
WAR TIME 



:Tig^>^o> 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK . BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 

ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



TO 

THE MEMORY OF 

ISAAC SHARPLESS 

One of the truest, best and most loved men I have 

ever known, who, though gone into the 

unseen, has left a luminous trail of 

light behind him, this book is 

affectionately dedicated 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction xi 

I Preparatory Steps 1 

II Formation of Plans 8 

III "The Haverford Unit" 17 

IV The Work of English Friends and the Plan of 

Cooperation with It 28 

V Problems of the Draft 47 

VI Getting Under Way 60 

VII Getting the Entire Society of Friends Behind 

THE Work 77 

VIII The Keepers of the Faith 85 

IX Furloughed for Reconstruction 109 

X In Paris at the Center 126 

XI Medical Work 144 

XII The Work of the Agricultural Department . . 157 

XIII Evacuations in the Spring 1918 173 

XIV Relief Work and Other Forms of Service . . 190 
XV Building and Reconstruction 209 

XVI The Verdun Project . . .• 227 

XVII American Friends Service Work in Other Lands 244 

Appendix A 
American Reconstruction Workers in France 267 

Appendix B 
Equipes and Centers of V/ork in France . . 283 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Friends Service Star Title Page y 

FACING 
PAGE 

Chateau Hospital Sermaize 151 '' 

Tractor Plowing \1\ ^ 

A Group of Refugees 183 ^ 

A Glimpse of the cite in Besancon Park 188 

Building Demountable Houses 217 

Map of the Verdun Area 227 

The Cite des Amis (Neuvilly) 236 



INTRODUCTION 

This book does not profess to be a history of the work of 
relief and reconstruction which Friends have done in 
France and Russia and in other countries since the fateful 
autumn of 1914. Only one who has been in the thick of the 
work on the field can write the final, intimate history of any 
one of the major relief undertakings of Friends. And as 
the work since 1917 has been a joint endeavor of English 
and American Friends the complete history of it must be 
composite, i. e. written by both English and Americans. It 
is to be hoped that persons of leisure will be found in the not 
distant future who can tell with sufficient detail the inter- 
esting story of the labors of this large band of volunteers 
who have rebuilt homes, revived agriculture, restored the 
spirits of depressed refugees, saved the lives of many chil- 
dren and reconstructed extensive areas of the desolated war- 
zones, who have gone out with living faith and with efficient 
relief into some of the darkest regions of the suffering world, 
both in war-time and in the no less appalling period which 
has followed the armistice. 

My attempt is much more modest. I am merely endeavor- 
ing here to interpret the effort which American Friends 
have made to express their spirit of human love to a part of 
the world — an innocent part — caught in the awful tangle 
of the tragedy. I should not have written it, certainly not 
at this time, if it had not been for the irresistible appeal of 
Isaac Sharpless, President Emeritus of Haverford College, 
who laid the task upon me with an urgency I could not with- 



xii INTRODUCTION 

stand. He wanted this much of the story told while it was 
still fresh and lively and he insisted that I must undertake 
it. I told him that I was too busy and could not stop to do 
it. He replied with his usual calm rejoinder which no one 
could ever resist : ' ' Nevertheless thee must do it — a man can 
always do more than he is doing!" After that I knew I 
had to do it, even if it was impossible, for more than once 
he has laid his hand on me to do the impossible. 

I have made as little reference to persons, including my- 
self, as was possible since this has been a corporate work and 
not an individual's doing. In the Odyssey everything cen- 
ters in one man, Odysseus, and we hear practically nothing 
of the exploits of his men. Our modem conceptions are 
very different. We are interested in the whole group, the 
men and the women, too, and leaders concern us precisely in 
so far as they are real leaders, and not solitary and exclusive 
doers of deeds. Some things which had to be told could not 
be told with the names gone and therefore they appear 
where they seemed obviously essential to the narrative. 

Assuming that the story of the English work will be 
fully told by some English Friend or Friends I have only 
incidentally dealt with it, but no readers of this book can 
miss the fact that what they did was a fundamental condi- 
tion to what we did. They were both authors and finishers 
of this venture of faith. We can not overstate our appre- 
ciation of their service and fellowship. Our work together 
in this time of agony has inaugurated a new era of relation- 
ship between English and American Friends which is pro- 
phetic of much for the future. 

Some of my readers may feel that I have devoted too 
much space to the problems of the military draft and to the 
experience of the conscientious objectors to war, instead of 
going directly to the central point of interest, the work in 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

the areas of desolation. The reason for the order and em- 
phasis which appear in my chapters is that the perspective 
of actual events as they occurred called for this order and 
emphasis. This book is something more than the story of 
an impressive piece of relief work. It is the interpretation 
of a way of life. The relief work took on a peculiar form 
and character just because it was the expression of a definite 
religious faith and sprang naturally out of an inner spirit 
and attitude to life. 

The members of the Society of Friends and other Chris- 
tians of similar faith who, under the compulsion of their 
deep-seated convictions, could not accept the methods of 
war loved their country with as much devotion and fervor 
as did any of its citizens. They did not take their unique 
and difficult position because they were obstructionists. 
They took it because they were inwardly pledged to a way 
of life which, if extended through the world, would elim- 
inate the seeds of war and would bring new and higher 
forces into operation within the fabric of society. They 
could not, therefore, of a sudden change the faith of a life- 
time and substitute the methods of war for the slower but 
not less effective forces of love and co-operation. They felt 
that for them to surrender their ideals of life in this crisis 
of history would be to prove recreant to the fundamental 
hopes of humanity. 

Most of the officials with whom I had frequent dealing in 
Washington, and many unofficial people, were convinced 
that we who took this position were consistent in our course 
and were doing right when we kept unswervingly on the 
path of life which our fathers had walked before us. Again 
and again I was told: "You are doing what you ought to 
do. We need to have in the world, especially now, some 
people who believe in the conquering power of love and who 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

express in deeds the conviction that Christ's Kingdom of 
God is something more than a dream or an illusion to be 
surrendered at every hard pinch. Some day we shall all 
be glad that you stood out, held on and would not yield to 
the mighty appeal of the hour.'' This position, as I have 
said, was no hasty expedient; it was as deep as life itself. 
To go back on it was to barter away the very faith which 
made life a rich and precious thing. 

But the one impossible course for those of us who held 
this faith was to refuse the call to fight and at the same 
time to refuse all responsibility for the tragedy, to with- 
draw into some calm retreat, assume for ourselves a holier 
attainment than that possessed by other Christians and 
secure an easy safety purchased by superior piety! No, 
to do that was to lose the soul as surely as though a contract 
had been signed with Mephistopheles. The world tragedy 
was a common tragedy for which we were all in our degree to 
blame and the agony ol which in some measure we were all 
bound to bear a share. It was not possible for one who had 
a real, living, throbbing soul within him to run away into 
some bomb-proof shelter built by faith and to wait in secur- 
ity until the storm rolled by. The great Pioneer who 
marked out the way of life we wished to take did quite 
otherwise when His crisis came. We wanted to show our 
faith in action and to show it in a way that would both 
bring healing to the awful wounds of war and at the same 
time take us out of self and selfish aims and carry us into 
the furnace where others were suffering. I have en- 
deavored to tell in the following pages how the door 
was opened for this type of service and how the 
men who had been confined in the army camps, bear- 
ing their silent testimony indeed, but unable to put 
their hands to any constructive task, were liberated by the 



INTRODUCTION xv 

government to join their freer fellows in doing this work 
of love in Europe. I have a feeling that this part of the 
story will have its own interest and will add to the interest 
of the work in the Marne, the Somme and the Meuse. 

Now that all the havoc and ruin of the world, with its 
boundless tragedy, is spread out before us, as it is for 
those who read, this other method of life may perhaps not 
look altogether foolish and irrational. Now that bank- 
ruptcy not only in financial credits, but in far more im- 
portant assets than money, has become a fact for much of 
the world, a new and unsuspected value may perhaps be 
seen in the elemental faiths of the human heart — faith in 
love, in truth, in fellowship, in co-operation, and in the 
spirit of forgiveness and sacrifice. Now that hunger and 
disease and greed and post-war hate have revealed their 
awful and malevolent sway, possibly it may be a relief to 
turn away from the dark picture and to read the simple 
story of an attempt to practice love both with friends and 
enemies in the midst of the disaster and catastrophe. 

In any case here is the story. It has been rapidly writ- 
ten, but it is as truthfully and fairly told as I have been 
able to tell it. I have had a good deal of valuable help from 
my friend Janet Payne Whitney of New York, especially 
in the collection of material which lay buried in letters 
and reports and minute-books. What appears here is only 
a small fragment out of a vastly greater mass of material, 
but I hope enough is given to show the quality of the ser- 
vice and the spirit of the volunteers who have performed 
it, and to indicate that they have 

"Lent their hand 
To the vast Soul that o'er them planned." 



A SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 
CHAPTER I 

PREPARATORY STEPS 

There will be tens of thousands of books written discuss- 
ing the causes of the Great War, telling the story of mobili- 
zation, describing in detail the movements of armies and 
navies and air fleets, drawing the portraits and characteris- 
tics of the great actors, and recounting the harrowing story 
of trench life. 

There will be another group of books devoted to review- 
ing the immense work of sanitation, ambulance service and 
medical and surgical reconstruction. The tragedies of the 
sea and the perils of raided cities will fill another series of 
volumes. The causes of the collapse of Russia and finally 
of the Central Powers, the propaganda of ideas, the armis- 
tice, the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaties which 
emerged from it will furnish a small library of books. 

It cannot be out of place to add to this vast literature one 
small volume which will tell in brief compass the story of 
the Mission of love and service which members of the Soci- 
ety of Friends maintained and carried through during the 
critical years of the war and aftenvards. It will prove to 
be, the writer believes, far more than a narrative of indi- 
vidual service and suffering ; far more, too, than an apology 
for the ancient historical position of the Quakers. It will, 
perhaps, turn out to be a contribution of some significance 



2 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

toward the discovery of a better way of dealing with acute 
international situations, and it may possibly make the work 
of mere peace-makers seem worthy of the gratitude of men. 
Every great war, of necessity, forces those who believe war 
to be incompatible with their interpretation of Christianity 
to investigate anew their position and to re-think the basis 
of their faith. The millstones of war grind "exceeding 
small.'' There is nothing which does not have to experi- 
ence the pressure of these stem pulverizers. Even the 
ideals of the soul are thrown into the all-embracing hopper 
for the grist of war, and they do not always come through 
uncrushed, unreduced. In former times Friends lived far 
more apart and isolated from the public affairs of the world 
than is the case to-day. They desired then to be, and to 
be thought, * ' a peculiar people. ' ' They welcomed opportu- 
nities to shut themselves oif from popular currents of 
thought and action. They wished to be individualistic, to 
nourish and cultivate a piety of their own exclusive type. 
They cherished from generation to generation a testimony 
in behalf of peace and they rigidly excluded from member- 
ship with themselves those who violated the testimony. 
Through favorable provisions of the state and federal gov- 
ernments Friends in America received from time to time a 
large measure of exemption from the requirements of mili- 
tary service and so, except in the very sternest crises, es- 
caped the severe testings which their views would otherwise 
have entailed. The Civil War brought the issue closer 
home to Friends in America than any former war had done, 
but the sjonpathy of President Lincoln was frequently 
manifested in behalf of Friends who were suffering for the 
sake of conscience, while Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary 
of War, did all that lay in his power to ease the condition 
of conscientious Quakers. In the Southern States Friends 



PREPARATORY STEPS 3 

maintained their testimony at great cost in agony and suf- 
fering and made their faith far clearer both to themselves 
and to others than had been the case for a century. 

When the Great War burst upon the world in the summer 
of 1914 Friends in America were not spiritually prepared 
to give an adequate interpretation of the ground and basis 
of their faith, nor were they clearly united upon a plan of 
action suited to and correspondent with their ideals of life. 
For more than two hundred and fifty years this body of 
Christian people had adhered to an interpretation of Chris- 
tianity which called for a way of life the practice of which 
was utterly incompatible with the spirit and method of war. 
The difficulty had been that this ''way of life" was often 
held in a nominal and traditional fashion and was not 
vitally and freshly thought out in an up-to-date manner. 
Then, again, most Friends had not clearly enough realized 
that the seeds of war lay thick and heavy in the existing 
social, economic and industrial conditions of life, and that 
their way of life ought to have led them into the spirit and 
activities which would have helped remove the occasion for 
war. The strain came first upon the Friends of Great Brit- 
ain and Ireland, of whom there were somewhat more than 
22,000 members, though from the first inception of the con- 
flict the leaders of thought among Friends in America real- 
ized that their central faith, their way of life, was now to 
be tried so as by fire. 

The first step which English Friends took was marked by 
real inspiration. It was the issuance of a Message, drafted 
during the first days of the war, "To Men and Women of 
Good-will in the British Empire. ' ' It began with these sol- 
emn words: ''We find ourselves to-day in the midst of 
what may prove to be the fiercest conflict in the history of 
the human race. Whatever may be our view of the processes 



4 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

which have led to its inception, we have now to face the fact 
that war is proceeding on a terrific scale and that our own 
country is involved in it." The Message reaffirmed the 
basic belief of the Society that ''the method of force is no so- 
lution of any question," that ''the fundamental unity of 
men in the family of God is the one enduring reality, ' ' and 
then issued a call to those "whose conscience forbade them 
to take up arms" to serve in other ways in the great crisis. 
' ' Our duty is clear, ' ' the Message declared, "to be courage- 
ous in the cause of love and in the hate of hate." A fine 
and lofty prophetic note ran through the entire document 
which made it a fresh and appealing interpretation of the 
Christian ideal and a word of hope at one of the darkest 
moments of modern history. The call to be "courageous in 
the cause of love" was immediately answered by a host of 
volunteers who were ready for the many avenues of service 
which opened at once to men and women of good-will. 

The three most notable forms of service which the Eng- 
lish and Irish Friends put into operation, almost from the 
beginning of the war, were (1) a voluntary ambulance unit 
under the Friends' Ambulance Committee: (2) an exten- 
sive system of relief for refugees and other victims of the 
war, directed by the "War Victims Relief Committee"; 
and (3) a service of assistance to aliens and their families 
under the "Emergency Committee for helping Aliens." 
A fourth form of service developed later when the Con- 
scription Law went into operation, which consisted of a 
work of help and counsel to those who were suffering for 
their faith as conscientious objectors. This work was 
managed by the "Friends' Service Committee." 

American Friends were from the first deeply interested 
in all these lines of service. As soon as definite knowledge 
of the appalling conditions abroad became general and when 



PREPARATORY STEPS 5 

Friends in this country realize how devotedly their fellow- 
members in Europe were engaging in missions of relief, 
they began making contributions of money in order to 
assist in financing these various lines of activity. This 
assistance, which amounted to about $5,000 a month, was 
by no means in adequate proportion to the immense sums 
which were being expended by English Friends, but it at 
least showed a vital sympathetic interest. In 1915 Rufus 
M. Jones selected four men — two of them, Edward Rice, Jr., 
and Felix Morley, recent graduates of Haverford College, 
and two of them. Earl Fowler and Howard Carey, gradu- 
ates of Earlham College — raised the money necessary to 
cover their expenses for a year of service abroad, and sent 
them out to join the Friends' Ambulance Unit in which 
they served with much satisfaction to the Unit and to the 
London Committee. This experience in co-operation with 
English Friends, small though it was, had a distinct in- 
fluence in shaping the larger future co-ox)eration. The 
letters which the four American workers wrote home, and 
the furlough-visit of Edward Rice, Jr., kept us keenly inter- 
ested and helped us to realize the advantages of fellowship 
and co-operation which would result if they were on a larger 
scale. 

After the opening of 1917 it became increasingly appar- 
ent that America was eventually to be drawn into the ever 
expanding vortex of the war. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting 
(Orthodox) held its annual gathering at the critical period 
when the decision of the United States to enter the war on 
the side of the Entente Allies was being consummated at 
Washington.^ It was an occasion of profound solemnity. 
An impressive letter was sent by the Yearly Meeting to 

1 Philadelphia Y. M. was held from the 20th to the 30th of March 
1917 and War was declared by the United States April 6th. 



6 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

President Woodrow Wilson, commending his efforts on 
behalf of Peace, expressing the attitude of "the silent 
masses of humanity who deplore the prospect of war ' ' and 
urging upon Congress to consider ''how vital to the inter- 
ests of humanity will be the coming decision." The Rep- 
resentative Meeting was keenly awake to the needs of the 
hour. It carefully watched over the interests of its young 
members and in order to be equipped for its varied tasks 
it appointed a secretary who should devote himself to the 
work. William B. Harvey was selected for this important 
service. 

For many years there had existed "a Peace Associa- 
tion of Friends," composed of members of Philadelphia 
Yearly Meeting (Orthodox) but not organic with the 
Yearly Meeting itself. Its work and aims were now ab- 
sorbed into the Yearly Meeting and a large Yearly Meet- 
ing's Committee was appointed to have the care and 
direction of the Peace activities of this body. It was a 
weighty group of men and women who were keenly alive 
to the critical issues of the hour, and they took many 
important forward steps dealing with problems of peace 
and war before the Service Committee was organized. 
The committee had already begun to work in close affilia- 
tion with a similar Peace Committee of the Race Street 
Yearly Meeting (Hicksite). 

Meantime another step had been taken which proved to 
be an important preparation for future active service. A 
Friends National Peace Conference was held at Winona 
Lake, Indiana, in July, 1915. This Conference appointed a 
Continuation Committee which consisted of a small group of 
Friends able to speak and act in some measure for all Ameri- 
can Friends. This National Committee occasionally joined 
with the Peace Committees of the two Philadelphia Yearly 



PKEPARATORY STEPS 7 

Meetings in formulating plans, and it issued, shortly before 
the declaration of War, a Message from the Society of 
Friends concerning the condition of affairs. This Message 
was printed as an advertisement in many of the leading 
magazines and newspapers of the United States. It con- 
tained the following important passage on constructive serv- 
ice : ''The alternative to war is not inactivity and cowardice. 
It is the irresistible and constructive power of good-will.** 
The Message proceeded to call for "the invention and 
practice on a gigantic scale of new methods of conciliation 
and altruistic service" and it declared that "the present 
intolerable situation among nations demands an unprece- 
dented expression of organized national good-will." This 
National Committee held an important conference in the 
city of Washington and for some months maintained a 
National Friends Bureau in that city. 

As soon as the decison for war was taken at Washing- 
ton, Rufus M. Jones and Dr. James A. Babbitt proceeded 
to organize an Emergency Unit at Haverford College 
which included practically the entire student body and 
a large part of the teaching staff. A fund of about $10,000 
was raised, the men were supplied with clothing suitable 
for their emergency service, were equipped with the neces- 
sary tents, tools, and materials, were furnished, through 
loans or gifts by friends, with automobiles and ambulances 
and entered strenuously upon training in a variety of forms 
such as would discipline and harden them and prepare them 
for almost any volunteer service abroad when the call 
should come to them. This emergency service at Haverford 
proved to be a distinct step in preparation for the Recon- 
struction Work which quickly succeeded it.^ 

1 Rufus M. Jones was Chairman of this Unit and Dr. James A. 
Babbitt was Director of it. 



CHAPTER II 

FORMATION OF PLANS 

The first stage in the organization of a joint American 
Friends Service Committee was taken April 30th, 1917. 
A meeting was held in Young Friends Building, Phila- 
delphia, composed of Friends, representing Philadelphia 
Yearly Meeting (Orthodox), Friends General Conferpnce 
(Hicksite), and the Five Years Meeting which is the cen- 
tral body of thirteen yearly meetings of ''Orthodox 
Friends."^ The primary object of the meeting was to 
consider the establishment of a Permanent National Head- 
quarters for the Society of Friends and to formulate plans 
for future service. It was pointed out that young Friends 
in all parts of the country were very eager to find lines of 
helpful activity in which they could conscientiously engage, 
at the time when other young men of their age were press- 
ing forward to volunteer for military and naval service. 
The possibility of joining with English Friends in Ambu- 
lance and Relief Work was considered, as was also the for- 
mation of an American Friends Ambulance Unit. It was 
the unanimous sense of the group that Friends could not 
accept exemption from military service and at the same 

1 The following persons were present : In the first group named 
above, Alfred G. Scattergood, Charles J. Rhoads, Stanley R. Yarnall, 
Henry W. Comfort, and Anne G. Walton. In the second, Jesse H. 
Holmes, Lucy Biddle Lewis, Arabella Carter, and William H. Cocks. 
In the third group, L. Hollingsworth Wood, Homer Morris and Vin- 
cent D. Nicholson. Henry J. Cadbury and J. Barnard Walton were 
unofficially in attendance. A temporary organization was effected. 

8 



FORMATION OF PLANS 9 

time do nothing to express their positive faith and devotion 
in the great human crisis. ^ The following minute was 
adopted: ''We are united in expressing our love for our 
country and our desire to serv^e her loyally. We offer our 
services to the Government of the United States in any 
constructive work in which we can conscientiously serve 
humanity. ' ' 

It was decided to arrange for headquarters, to appoint 
permanent officers, including an executive secretary, and to 
enlarge the Committee. Meantime the members of the So- 
ciety of Friends who belonged to the Emergency Unit at 
Haverford were pressing strongly for some satisfactory 
form of constructive service into which they could throw 
their energies. After much correspondence with English 
Friends it developed that the difficulties of obtaining 
''permits from the War Office made the service of Ameri- 
can volunteers practically impossible in the Friends' Am- 
bulance Unit and extremely limited in the work of the 
War Victims Committee. Under these circumstances Dr. 
James A. Babbitt and Rufus M. Jones went to New York 
to have a conference with Eliot Norton concerning the 
possibility of formino^ a volunteer Ambulance Unit of 
American Friends to be affiliated with the Harjes-Norton 
Unit. A cable to Paris in response to our request revealed 
the fact that all American ambulance work was shortly to 
be militarized. That door of service, therefore, seemed 
completely closed. Just at this time President Wilson was 
reorganizing the American Red Cross to meet the great 
emergency. He called Henry P. Davison of New York to 
undertake the direction of all foreign War-Relief Work, 

1 It was supposed at this period that the exemption clause in the 
Draft Law would give Friends complete exemption. We shall see 
later that it did not do so. 



10 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

and at the same time he asked Grayson Mallet-Prevost Mur- 
phy to become Chief of the American Red Cross in France. 
Grayson Murphy was a graduate of the William Penn 
Charter School in Philadelphia and he had been for two 
years (1896-1898) a student at Haverford College. He 
had, in college, been on intimate terms with Rufus M. 
Jones and the latter, upon hearing of his appointment wrote 
to him at once suggesting that a Friends' Unit for Relief 
Work in France might be formed, and asking if he would 
like to take up the matter in person. His answer was 
most cordial and encouraging, indicating a real desire for 
an interview. Rufus M. Jones asked Alfred G. Scatter- 
good, L. Hollingsworth Wood, Vincent D. Nicholson, and 
Harold Evans to accompany him to Washington for the 
conference. Grayson Murphy heartily welcomed the sug- 
gestion of the formation of a Quaker Unit to work in 
co-operation with the civilian ser\dce of the American Red 
Cross in France, and he suggested that a small commission 
of Friends be sent to France to work out the plans on the 
field. Henry P. Davison had just arrived at the Red Cross 
Headquarters in Washington and was beginning his great 
work on the day of the Friends' visit. Grayson Murphy 
invited him to join in the conference, saying to him as he 
introduced them: ^'I know the Friends of old and I can 
guarantee to you that if they promise to do a piece of work 
they will do it, and they will do it well.'' Henry P. Davi- 
son fell in heartily with the proposal and gave it his official 
approval and endorsement. The little group of Friends re- 
turned from Washington in great joy and with high hopes. 
It was the first of many visits to the capital for some of 
the party and few journeys of the kind proved more 
memorable. 

Grayson Murphy followed up his invitation to have a 



FORMATION OF PLANS 11 

Friends' Commission go to France by a request to Rufiis 
M. Jones to meet him for further conference in New York 
City. The latter, accompanied by J. Henry Scattergood, 
went to New York where the plans for the proposed work 
were made much more definite. "We were encouraged to 
make arrangements to train a unit of a hundred men for 
the foreign service, and Grayson Murphy generously pro- 
posed that at least two Friends should go to France on 
the same steamer with him and the other Red Cross Com- 
missioners to make the definite plans on the field for the 
future service, for which in the meantime the workers 
would be training and equipping. 

While these matters were progressing the central com- 
mittee, which was eventually to manage the work, was 
gradually growing into definite form and organization. 
This committee was considerably enlarged so as to be fairly 
representative of American Friends, and its name changed 
to American Friends Service Committee. Vincent D. Nich- 
olson, a young Friend of striking abilities and of deeply 
consecrated spirit, was appointed executive secretary, to 
whom the committee owes a debt of gratitude. Rufus M. 
Jones was asked to become chairman of the committee, which, 
after much reflection and serious consideration, he con- 
sented to do, with a deep sense of what was involved in the 
step. Charles F. Jenkins accepted the heavy work of the 
treasurership and Alfred G. Scattergood was made vice- 
chairman and chairman of the finance committee. The 
committee unanimously decided to adopt the work outlined 
in conference with Grayson Murphy, and to go forward 
with the plans for its execution and development. J. 
Henry Scattergood and L. Hollingsworth "Wood were asked 
to form the Commission for France with the understanding 
that if either one of them were unable to accept the two 



12 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Friends named to go, in consultation with the officers of the 
committee, should appoint a substitute. As L. HoUings- 
worth Wood found it impossible to go, Morris E. Leeds 
of Philadelphia was chosen to accompany J. Henry Scatter- 
good. , It was a fortunate selection and most faithfully and 
wisely did they perform their delicate and difficult mission. 
They were requested to confer with English Friends and 
to bring the American service into as close relation as pos- 
sible with that being carried on under the London Com- 
mittee. In that matter, too, they were peculiarly successful, 
as future chapters will show. 

The commissioners sailed on La Touraine from New 
York June 2nd in company with the large Red Cross 
Commission and, though it was a time of great danger at 
sea, they arrived at their destination without mishap. 

The tentative budget proposed for the operations of the 
first year was put at $110,000 for the foreign work and 
$5,000 for home expenses, but this modest estimate was 
very soon transcended. In response to definite requests 
from the London War Victims Committee it was decided to 
send a small band of American workers to France to under- 
take service under the English committee, and to select a 
group of women to go to Russia to engage in the work at 
Buzuluk under the Russian section of the same committee. 
Both of these groups were to be supported and financed by 
the American committee and the workers were to serve 
without compensation. George V. Downing, Edith Coale, 
Douglas and Eleanor Waples, Ernest L. Brown, Howard W. 
and Katherine W. Elkinton were accepted for the work in 
France, and Lydia C. Lewis, Anna J. Haines, Nancy Babb, 
Esther M. White, Emilie C. Bradbury and Amelia Farb- 
iszewski were chosen for Russia. A little later William 



FORMATION OF PLANS 13 

M. and Mary Elkinton Duguid were added to the list of 
American workers for France. 

Even before the Service Committee was established the 
Young Friends Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meet- 
ing (Orthodox) had been in correspondence with the War 
Victims Committee of London and had decided to raise 
money and send a group of workers both to France and 
Russia. They had already selected most of those who made 
up the two above mentioned lists of volunteers. This step 
was largely due to the initiative of Leah T. Cadbury of 
Haverford, who had given a term of service previously in 
France. 

While the two commissioners were on their voyage to 
France and were making their preliminary study of the 
possible fields of service open to us there, plans were being 
developed on this side for the selection and training of 
a hundred men. Rufus M. Jones, LeRoy Mercer, Vincent 
D. Nicholson, and Henry J. Cadbury formed the original 
committee to formulate the application blanks, to determine 
upon qualifications, and to make the selection of the first 
hundred men. Applications came in thick and fast and 
almost swamped the small committee. There were many 
complicated questions to settle and extremely little light 
to go by. No one knew yet what the nature of the work 
abroad would eventually be, whether building, agriculture, 
or relief. We realized in a general way that the occasion 
would call for physical endurance, sterling moral character, 
quick adaptability, and readiness to serve with hands or 
head in a wide variety of lines. We endeavored as far 
as possible to have the group composed of men who were 
conscientiously opposed to war, and for that reason unable 
to engage in it. This problem, however, proved to be a 



14 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

very difficult one. Many of the applicants had never 
faced the question for themselves. They had not thought 
through the issues involved. They all hated war. They 
had no doubt at all in their minds that war was one of 
the things that ought not to be in this world of ours. 
But here it was, an existing fact. Whether they liked 
it or not it was in full operation and their own government 
had seen no way to avoid an entrance into it. The situa- 
tion presented to them was an unescapable rivalry of 
loyalties. How far w^ere they under obligation to serve 
their country in a mission which appeared to conflict with 
their ideals of right and wrong, and how far did the 
unexpected desperate world-situation which confronted 
them lay upon them a call to break with the settled teach- 
ing and attitude of their type of Christianity? These 
and many other questions of a kindred sort rose and 
recurred in every serious young Friend's mind. It 
was obviously extremely difficult for the committee to 
decide what was the real state of mind of the appli- 
cant, since in many cases he did not know himself. 
The canons of physical fitness were easy to formulate; 
the scrutiny of the inward process of the soul, was, 
on the other hand, a baffling undertaking. We did 
our best to discover in these early days when the draft 
was approaching how deep-seated and how honest was 
the conviction of duty which led the applicant to turn 
to the sphere of service in which we were engaged. The 
decision was not always right but it was always at least 
very seriously made. 

Another point of great importance confronted us. What 
was to be our uppermost aim in our service? Was it to 
be first and foremost a service of love to suffering France, 
an expedition of relief for a part of the world which had 



FORMATION OF PLANS 15 

been brought to awful desolation ; or was it to be primarily 
an opportunity for conscientiously-minded Friends to find 
an alternative form of service which would relieve them 
from the forced obligation of war? Were we to con- 
sider further the way in which this service would inspire 
and unify the Society of Friends and arouse it to its proper 
sense of mission in the world-crisis, or were we rather to 
think only of what we could do and give to relieve misery, 
without consideration of the reward of reaction upon 
Friends themselves? In selecting men should we have in 
view the work to be done abroad or the effect to be accom- 
plished upon the person himself and more especially upon 
the wider circle to which he belonged at home? These 
questions could not be kept out of sight and they were as 
difficult to answer honestly as were the other questions of 
conscience referred to above. It was our settled policy and 
purpose in all sincerity to select men with clear reference 
to the service which they were to render abroad. That was 
always in the focus of our minds as we toiled over the heaps 
of letters and papers that poured in upon us. We concluded 
that only in one way could this piece of work be great 
and good, or in the end produce any lasting effect, and 
that was by the selection of the best group of men that was 
available to us to do the work. In that spirit the selec- 
tion was made. We kept learning wisdom in the process 
of the work, gradually we discovered the defects and inade- 
quacies of our methods, and little by little our system of 
selection grew into better shape. It succeeded, however, 
even in the first stages, in securing a remarkable band of a 
hundred men for France whose training will be recounted 
in the next chapter. 

One of the great good fortunes that came to us almost 
at the beginning and which has lasted throughout the 



16 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

whole period of service was the privilege of using the Friends 
Institute at 20 South Twelfth Street, Philadelphia, as 
headquarters for the Service Committee. This came 
through the kindness and generous spirit of the board of 
managers of the Institute. The disposal of the rooms put 
at our service involved a decided sacrifice and carried with 
it much inconvenience for those who had enjoyed the com- 
fort and the almost constant use of this central meeting- 
place. It was turned over to us with much grace and 
revealed how deeply Friends entered heart and soul into the 
undertaking. We began on the lower floor, but the room 
was dark and was soon far too small for our operations. 
We overflowed into adjoining rooms and spaces, until we 
were in the way of almost everybody. Then we were al- 
lowed to ''go up higher" to the second floor, where gradu- 
ally most of the space of this floor became crowded with 
desks, typewriters, files and busy workers. Here one could 
see almost any day great duffel bags, rolls and other trav- 
eler's kits, either of debarking or returning workers and 
always it was a busy but interesting scene of activity. 



CHAPTER III 



Haverford College generously offered its beautiful 
grounds and buildings to be used as the summer head- 
quarters for organizing and training the group of a 
hundred men which, for that reason, came to be known 
as *'the Haverford Unit." The members of it, whose 
names are given in Appendix I, represented all sec- 
tions of the Society of Friends and also included a 
small number of men who were not in membership 
with Friends but who shared in large measure the prin- 
ciples and ideals of the Friends. Four members of the 
group represented the Fellowship of Reconciliation. There 
was only one Mennonite in the company, as at this period 
the bond of fellowship, which later became close between 
the two religious bodies, had not yet been established. The 
so-called smaller bodies of Friends (Wilburites) had not 
yet become interested in the plans which were going for- 
ward, but the two larger branches of Friends in America 
(for want of better names called *' Orthodox" and ''Hicks- 
ite") were proportionately represented in the list of men 
who were selected to carry our ideals of service into prac- 
tical execution, though among the workers themselves there 
was no thought of "branches" nor was there any line of 
separation. The seventeenth of July 1917 was set as the 
date — a memorable date to many of us — for assembling at 
Haverford to begin training. Barclay Hall was assigned to 

17 



18 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the unit as living quarters. The dining hall and kitchen 
were put at the service of the men. The wood-working 
section of the mechanical engineering building was thrown 
open. Chase Hall was set apart for classes, while the Col- 
lege Union was occupied for lectures, meetings and enter- 
tainments. L. Ralston Thomas, Richard M. Gummere, and 
Robert G. Brown were selected to form the governing coun- 
cil, to manage and direct the unit during its period of train- 
ing, with the expectation that Dr. James A. Babbitt, whose 
summer was engaged at Chautauqua, would join the unit 
before the period of training was finished and go to France 
with it as its director. 

The brief time which elapsed between the selection of 
the men and the date of assembling was crowded with mul- 
titudinous activity on the part of the various subcom- 
mittees, especially on the part of the executive secretary 
and chairman of the general committee. Many journeys to 
Washington had to be taken to complete the arrangements 
with the Red Cross and to secure light from the War 
Department upon the status of the men who were joining 
our unit, and upon the probability of their being allowed 
to leave the country for their proposed service. The 
''light*' that was secured at this stage of the proceedings 
was, however, never very illuminating! About all we 
could guess was that a man of draft age would be allowed 
to leave the country if he signed a promise to return when 
he was ''called." It was necessary to work out in minute 
detail the plan for summer training, the system of teaching 
French, the types of occupational training, the list of lec- 
tures, the methods of feeding the group, and a long lot of 
et ceteras. All of which things would have been easy 
enough for experts, but they were by no means easy prob- 
lems for the busy men who had them to solve and who 



**THE HAVERFORD UNIT" 19 

at the same time were wondering whether any concrete 
service in France would ever open and whether the draft 
boards would let us have the men who were preparing to 
train. It was never easy to sleep with peaceful mind dur- 
ing those nights of the interim, nor was it always so even 
after the interim was over! 

There was a strong desire on the part of many Friends 
that women should have a chance to serve as well as men, 
and tentative steps were taken to prepare a group of women 
workers as soon as there should be any prospect that there 
would be an opening for their service. A subcommittee 
was appointed to have charge of women 's work and to make 
selection of women workers. A few nurses and social 
workers were already called for by cable from the London 
War Victims' Committee, and these were quickly supplied 
from a long list of willing applicants. Sewing groups were 
being formed during the early summer in all the communi- 
ties of Friends throughout the country, and these centers of 
activity did much to cultivate interest in all the lines of 
service and also to stimulate young Friends of both sexes 
to volunteer for service. The remarkable output of the 
sewing groups will be dealt with in a future chapter. 

In order to arouse all young Friends to the significance 
of the crisis through which the world was passing and which 
was bound to be a critical epoch for American Friends, the 
executive board of the Service Committee decided to send 
out Thomas E. Jones, then secretary of the Young Friends 
Board of the Five Years Meeting, to hold local conferences 
with young Friends in all parts of the country, to attend 
the approaching Yearly Meetings, to present the service 
work at the coming Cedar Lake Conference of young 
Friends, and to do field work for the committee between 
July 1st and September 20th at which time he was to go 



20 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

to Japan. As definite plans matured, and the knowledge 
of the proposed service spread abroad among Friends, the 
response of interest was immediate. "Without any pres- 
sure and with little organized effort contributions of money 
began to flow into the treasury so that the problem of 
raising money was one of the least of the problems. We 
endeavored to make an arrangement with the Red Cross 
before the "drive" for $100,000,000 began in the summer 
of 1917, so that the contributions made by Friends to this 
"drive" could be set apart for our work. It proved im- 
possible to make this arrangement for the whole country, 
though a plan was formulated for the Philadelphia district 
by which Friendly subscribers could make their subscrip- 
tions payable to our treasurer and at the same time have 
them count toward the Red Cross total. The plan was only 
partly successful, though it brought some goodly increases 
to our funds. 

While these plans and efforts were going forward with 
what seemed like promise and good augury our commis- 
sioners in France were being confronted with many diffi- 
culties. The Red Cross commission to France consisted of 
twenty-one persons representing a large number of phases 
of work. They obviously could not form their plans quickly 
nor could they decide any fundamental questions concern- 
ing civilian relief until the field of possible operation had 
been pretty thoroughly surveyed and the whole appalling 
situation in which France found itself after three years of 
desolating war was studied. Ernest P. Bicknell of Indiana, 
a trained social expert who had had much experience in 
administering relief at times of great catastrophes, was a 
member of the commission. So, too, was Dr. John Van 
Schaick of Washington, who had already had extensive 
experience in dealing with war conditions in Belgium and 



''THE HAVERFORD UNlT^' 21 

Holland. Our two Friends were given every opportunity 
to co-operate with these two men and with their helpers 
in their investigation of the conditions of devastated areas 
and of refugees. The work of relief and reconstruction 
already accomplished by the English Friends made a deep 
impression on the commissioners who investigated it, both 
Friends and non-Friends. This type of work seemed to 
them a splendid model for America to follow and every 
one who studied it felt still further convinced that the 
spirit in which it was being done might well be taken as 
an ideal to be striven for by any new band of workers. 
Meantime, however, the days and weeks were passing and 
no definite plan of service for Friends could yet be formu- 
lated for the hundred men who were selected. The War 
Victims Committee, under existing conditions, could not use 
many more workers, and in any ease, could not, without 
long delays, secure permits for the workers to engage in 
the service within the most needy areas. The American 
Red Cross was not yet ready to offer any concrete service 
in which men composing the Haverford Unit could be used. 
Consequently our two commissioners felt compelled to in- 
form us that no door was yet open for us. Three or four 
days before the hundred men were to arrive at Haverford 
a cable, dated July 11th, was received saying: "Red Cross 
not ready for w^orkers. . . . Advise keeping men at home 
jobs, studying French until needed." The cable indicated 
that twenty persons, nearly all men, would be needed in 
the near future and that a plan for using more workers in 
affiliation with English Friends was under consideration. 
The message also implied that all Red Cross work, — even 
the civilian work — might very likely be militarized in the 
near future. 

This cable was a staggering piece of news and gave us 



22 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

much serious thought. We decided, however, to go straight 
on with our original plans, to let the hundred men come to 
Haverford as already arranged, and to have them ready 
for whatever opportunity might offer. A return cable 
was sent announcing that a hundred men had already left 
their homes and were in training, and that we were count- 
ing upon the formation of plans in France that would give 
them a future field of service. Steps were taken at the same 
time to send at once the men and women for whom openings 
had been found in connection with the War Victims work. 
On the evening of July 16th the men composing the unit 
were arriving at Haverford, registering in the never-to-be- 
forgotten improvised office in "North Barclay" and being 
assigned to their quarters. The following general schedule 
of training had been adopted : 

5 :45 A.M. Time of rising, followed by ten minutes 

of physical exercise in front of Bar- 
clay. 

6:30 a.m. Breakfast, followed by washing of 

dishes and room work. 

7:30- 8:25 a.m. Talks by members of the Council or of 
the Unit. 

8:30- 9:25 a.m. Talks by specialists on Social Service, 
sanitation, hygiene, conditions in 
France, etc. 

9 :30-ll :30 A.M. Study of French under several compe- 
tent instructors. 
12 :00 M. Dinner. 

2:00- 5:30 p.m. Squad work in carpentry, mason-work, 
agriculture, road-making, auto re- 
pairing, and other forms of techni- 
cal skill. 



*'THE HAVERFORD UNIT" 23 

6 :00 P.M. Supper. 

7:00 p.m. Devotional Meeting. 

7:30 p.m. a lecture every other night dealing 

with the world conditions, with 
special reference as far as possible 
to France and the future work of 
the Unit. 

The day was so full that no time was available for news- 
paper reading and consequently one member of the unit 
was detailed to present each evening, at the close of the 
devotional meeting, a survey of the news of the day. Lewis 
S. Gannett generally did this and he did it with much 
insight and thereby rendered to everybody a distinctly 
important service. One of the happy features of the train- 
ing time was the publication of a weekly paper (begun 
August 14th) called L'Eqiiipe, of which Lewis S. Gannett 
was editor. It contained much amusing material, some 
experiments in French composition and verse-writing, and 
considerable valuable information. Four numbers of 
L^Equipe were issued. The devotional meetings were a 
feature of the day and from the first an effort was made 
to fuse the whole undertaking with a deep religious spirit. 

The lectures in the morning and evening were of a very 
high order. Most of the speakers were experts and spoke 
to the men out of long experience and brought real illum- 
ination to them. For the most part they gave their ser- 
vices and in some cases made large sacrifices to assist us. 
The French instruction, which was arranged and directed 
by President W. W. Comfort, then just entering upon his 
career as President of Haverford, was admirable through- 
out. The men, most of whom were in ''the empty tablet" 
state as to French, made astonishing progress and found 



24 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

themselves greatly advanced by the summer's work. The 
squad work, which was divided into departments as indi- 
cated above, filled the afternoons. It was a summer of 
unusual heat but the men worked with zeal and diligence, 
mastering the mysteries of threshing machines, the stub- 
bornness of farm tractors, and the endless mechanical 
diseases which old "Fords" and auto trucks are heir to. 
The township commissioners gave us excellent opportu- 
nities to learn the art of road-making. The Haverford Col- 
lege farmer found that some of the men already knew 
nearly all there was to know about agriculture but he also 
found that some of them, like the ancient Ninevites, did 
not yet "know their right hand from their left" in these 
matters. These "unskilled laborers," however, were 
quick learners and made excellent progress. Everybody 
in turn worked at carpentry and a selected number, under 
good teaching, learned how to construct brick and stone 
foundations and how to make mortar and "concrete." 

The appetites which these afternoon squads developed 
were memorable. Our food was always abundant and well 
cooked, but the menu was not extensive nor marked by 
great variety. The service was performed by the men 
themselves and the dishes were washed by the squads tak- 
ing turns. The actual cooking was done by a trained 
employee. There was a certain roughness to the fare but it 
furnished the necessary fuel for the physical efforts and it 
was an appropriate preparation for the later experiences 
in the French equipes. 

One of our complicated problems concerned the cloth- 
ing and equipment of the men. At first we merely took 
over the uniforms which the men in the Emergency Unit 
had worn. These were cleansed and renovated and served 
our unit well in the period of training, though they were 



**THE HAVERFORD UNIT'' 25 

far too heavy for a Pennsylvania summer. Ralston 
Thomas, already a good deal of an expert, gave much time 
and thought to the selection of a permanent outfit which 
gradually took shape as our service abroad became assured. 
Blankets for future service, camp beds, and all the para- 
phernalia for outdoor life and work began to accumulate 
in the Barclay Hall rooms. Into the midst of our beehive 
of activity suddenly came the immense fact of the army 
draft which selected out a large group of our men for a 
totally different type of service than the one for which we 
were busily preparing. This story of the draft and how 
it affected us must wait for another chapter. 

Meanwhile, as the summer went on, J. Henry Scatter- 
good and Morris E. Leeds in France were successfully 
pushing forward the arrangements for a great field of work 
in union with English Friends and in conjunction with the 
American Red Cross. A letter written by Henry Scat- 
tergood from Paris July 11th, the day the above mentioned 
cable was sent, gives a clear account of the situation which 
faced the two commissioners and the prospect at that time 
for an American service in France. The letter said in 
part: ^'As for reconstruction, the problem is most com- 
plicated. It is a fact that many thousands of homes have 
been destroyed, sometimes whole villages being wiped out. 
It is clear that rebuilding in permanent form is a task be- 
yond even the $100,000,000 of the Red Cross if it all were 
to go to houses, and it is necessarily beyond the scope of 
temporary relief measures. The French Government re- 
gards the loss of each individual as a national loss to be 
paid for by the nation as a whole, the damages to be paid 
to the individual sufferers when such damages can be prop- 
erly assessed. This question of such assessment and 
awards is now being discussed in the French Parliament. 



26 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

In some localities local Boards are beginning to make assess- 
ments with the hope of expediting it. Evidently work of 
a permanent character is impracticable on privately-owned 
property until all these questions are settled, and we are 
told that often owners do not want any clearing done yet for 
fear of interfering with the proofs of their losses. Yet it is 
evidently advantageous to get the people back when and if 
they can find a place to live so that the land can be tilled, 
and so that the overcrowded conditions of other places can 
be relieved. The natural solution is the temporary hut that 
the English Friends have devised to serve for the years until 
permanent rebuilding can be worked out. Yet even these 
need much preparatory work to be done before they can be 
built or our men can start work on them. They have to be 
made in sections in some part of France where the lumber 
can be obtained, as for instance in Dole in the Jura. A mill 
of large dimensions in floor space and storage capacity (to 
season lumber) has to be found or built before this work 
can be started. Then the houses have to be shipped to the 
"VYar Zone before anything can be done there, and this may 
take weeks or months. If any great military work is on, 
civilian shipments are postponed indefinitely. The English 
Friends, for instance, are only just receiving their first 20 
houses to be erected in the newly released district in the 
Somme, although they have been waiting for many weeks 
for them and also for the permits to go there. Our pre- 
conception of a group of 100 of our men rapidly arranging 
themselves among the destroyed villages, building the 
houses, ^already at hand, in a short time, and passing on to 
the next village to repeat the operation, is utterly impossible 
of immediate execution, although some may hope to work 
to this when once under way. ' ' 

In spite of these difficulties our Friends achieved the 



''THE HAVERFORD UNIT" 27 

signal success of formulating a plan of work, admirably 
adapted to our purpose and capable of constant adjustment 
to fit the shifting circumstances abroad. The complete plan 
of work as outlined will be presented later ; it is sufficient to 
say at this point that the reports by cable and letters which 
informed us that positive plans of work were being made, 
and that the door for service was actually to open, gave us 
the liveliest joy and brought immense inspiration to the 
workers toiling at their tasks of preparation. As soon as 
we found that we were likely to construct demountable 
houses in France, we got a blue print of the type of house, 
changed it from the scale of meters to a scale of feet, and 
built a sample house on a brick foundation which our own 
''masons" laid. Morris E. Leeds returned home in August 
and brought us much definite information and aroused fresh 
inspiration for our daily work of preparation. After the 
middle of August Eichard M. Gummere felt compelled to 
withdraw from the Council of Direction and L. Hollings- 
worth Wood took his place and contributed very greatly to 
the fine spirit of fellowship which steadily increased as the 
summer advanced. At the end of August Dr. James A. 
Babbitt joined the Unit in person, took charge of the final 
physical examination of the men, and took direction of the 
finishing stages of training. He undertook his work in a 
devoted spirit and he put earnestness of heart into all that 
he did. 

As the six weeks of life together at Haverford drew to- 
ward a close, those of us who were most deeply interested in 
the success of the venture knew that we had a splendid band 
of men going forth to the tasks over seas, and, I can say for 
one, that they had won my love and affection and confidence. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS AND THE PLAN OP 
COOPERATION WITH IT 

Some time — in the near future, we hope — ^the story of 
the English Friends' work for relief in France will be told 
as it deserves to be told. It was launched, as has already 
been said, very soon after the war began. The entrance of 
the British Friends into the field is well described in a few 
paragraphs by J. Thompson Elliott of London, himself a 
pioneer in their plans : 

*'As the tragedy unfolded in the first few weeks of the 
war, English Friends burned with the desire to do some- 
thing — anything — to relieve the anguish and misery which, 
it was only too clear, would exist on a scale so appalling as 
to constitute the supreme call of a lifetime. It is probable 
that the first Friends to get into contact with any refugees 
were those at Folkestone, Kent, where streams of Belgians 
were being landed. Large numbers of these were fed and 
temporarily housed at Folkestone Meeting House, and the 
Peace Committee of the Meeting for Sufferings began to 
consider what service Friends might have amongst Belgian 
refugees in Holland. 

' ' Simultaneously, Dr. Hilda Clark had envisaged the need 
for medicinal and nursing work among the civil population 
of stricken and invaded France, and with the aid of T. Ed- 
mund Harvey, M. P. and Edith M. Pye, was striving hard to 
find the right channel through which to move. Her con- 

28 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 29 

cern and that of the Peace committee were laid before the 
Meeting for Sufferings on the 4th of September 1914, and 
both were warmly endorsed by the meeting, which appointed 
a small committee including William A. Albright, who sub- 
sequently became chairman, to take up the work and make 
known to Friends what was being done, and to appeal for 
workers and money. The sum asked for to begin with was 
3000 pounds. Hilda Clark and T. Edmund Harvey acted 
as joint Hon. Secretaries and the work was carried on at 8 
Mylne St., Middleton Square, London, E. C. 

' ' Meantime another pioneer was taking action, and on the 
20th of September, less than a fortnight after the Battle of 
the Mame, George Henry Mennell, accompanied by his wife, 
who is a Frenchwoman, started for Paris armed with the 
actual passport and brassard with the red and black star 
carried by his father Henry Tuke Mennell in 1870-71 when 
a member of the Friends ' War Victims Relief Expedition in 
the Franco-Prussian War." 

T. Edmund Harvey and Dr. CD. Holdsworth went to 
Holland the latter part of September, 1914 to investigate 
the condition of refugees there and about the same time 
Edith M. Pye went to France to see what could be done by 
Friends by way of nursing and medical relief. J. Edward 
Hodgkin and Gulielma Crosfield followed up the study of 
conditions in Holland. T. Edmund Harvey went to France 
early in October and made preliminary arrangements for 
the beginning of a Quaker Mission. This visit was followed 
almost immediately by the visit of the little party of Friends 
which included George Henry Mennell and his wife and his 
brother Edward Mennell. Gradually the plans took shape, 
the home committee was organized with William A. Albright 
as chairman and during the early stage with Edmund 
Wright Brooks and A. Ruth Fry as executive secretaries. 



30 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Edmund Harvey went on a second trip to Bordeaux to 
secure permissions for the expedition to begin operations 
and on November 4th the first installment of the French 
Mission started for its field of service under the leadership 
of T. Edmund Harvey and Dr. Hilda Clark, a grand- 
daughter of John Bright. There were twenty-five in the 
party. The workers adopted as their brassard the famous 
star of black and red which the Quaker Relief workers 
had worn in the Franco-Prussian War. They were as- 
signed to the district of the Marne and soon selected Ser- 
maize, a dreadfully devastated town, as the headquarters of 
their operations. 

The main part of the English Friends' Relief work was 
established in the Valley of the upper Marne, between Bar- 
le-Duc to the southeast and Chalons-sur-Mame to the north- 
west, the extreme line occupied by the Germans. Bar-le- 
Duc was not destroyed at all, and Chalons-sur-Marne was 
very little damaged. 

Two classes which suffered most from conditions, espec- 
ially in or near the war-zone, were naturally the children, 
and the expectant mothers. A Maternity Hospital was 
established by English Friends at Chalons in 1914, as being 
among the first things to require attention. About five 
hundred babies had been bom there when the American 
Commission visited it, and care had been exercised from the 
hospital over released patients, and also as far as possible 
over the welfare of all small children within reach. 

A Children's Hospital was also established at Bettan- 
court, in a chateau loaned by the Countess Morrillot. Here 
sick or nerve-shattered children were received for care and 
treatment, as well as a number of others whose families 
were "sticking to their homes" in dangerous places. *'An 
illustration of the conditions which made this home and 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 31 

hospital necessary is that of a little girl who was brought 
there by her mother with the remark that she could not keep 
her at home because she could not make her keep her gas- 
mask on. ' ' 

The taking of children away from bombarded districts 
and placing them in safe and healthy country places was 
an early concern to the Friends' Relief. The largest single 
piece of work of this kind was the taking of the children 
away from Rheims and vicinity, almost continuously under 
bombardment, where the 7,000 remaining inhabitants of 
the former 120,000, were dodging about from cellar to 
cellar. The gratitude and relief of the parents was very 
great, and the eagerness of the poor little nervous children 
to go into safety and to play once more^ — an almost forgotten 
art — was pathetic. Not only play did the children long for, 
but lessons. In many cases they had had no school since 
the beginning of the war. Here was another chance for 
Friends to serve. 

Overcrowding of people in cellars, or in ill-ventilated 
rooms, tended to induce tuberculosis. Friends started a 
convalescent home at Samoens, in the Haute-Savoie, for in- 
cipient tubercular patients from Paris and other cities, and 
another, at the time of the visit of the American Commis- 
sion, had just been opened at Entremont. 

District nursing centers had been established at Chalons, 
Bar-le-Duc, Troyes, Sermaize, Paris and other places. At 
Sermaize, also, there was at this time a small Friends' hos- 
pital for women and children with a doctor, dentist, and 
several nurses, attending both out- and in-patients. 

Reconstruction and agricultural work were progressing. 
Friends had adopted the plan of placing comparatively few 
workers in each village, so that, living for several months 
among the people, they ''established with them just the 



32 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

kind of intimate and friendly relationship, ' ' says a member 
of the American Commission, *' which is such an admirable 
characteristic of their work. ' ' They believed that the min- 
istration of personal and intimate friendship and good-will 
was as important as physical aid in helping these homeless 
and bereft people to attack anew the problem of living 
with courage and hope. 

In Sermaize, one hundred and three of the portable 
wooden houses — maisom dSmontahles — of which the parts 
were made in England and shipped over to be put together 
where required — ^had been erected by the Friends' Relief. 
Each house was surmounted by a garden, now well under 
cultivation. No civilian who had fled from his home when 
the Germans came was permitted to return to his village un- 
less he had a place to stay. The first thing to do, therefore, 
was to provide a hut or temporary place to live in for the 
people who were sheltering in neighboring cities, but were 
eager to get back to their land. When the American Com- 
mission visited this district, they found Friends engaged 
on five villages northeast of Ham, which had been assigned 
them by the Minister of the Interior, and starting at Tuguy 
by building a hut for the Mayor so that he could return. 
He was a large landowner, and could give employment to 
many of his townspeople as soon as huts and tools were 
provided for them. At Villers-St. Christophe, another of 
the five villages, the Mayor had already returned, and was 
working hard for the re-establishment of the village. In 
this place the Germans had been in occupation for quite a 
while, and before their departure had cleared out all the 
civilian population, and kept them in a strange village, im- 
prisoned in a* few houses, while they wrecked Villers-St. 
Christophe. The first to work her way back was a young 
woman, who at once took hold of what would ordinarily 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 33 

have been the Mayor's work, and managed things so well 
for the two months until the aged Mayor's return that the 
Sous-Prefet of the Department had already sent materials 
for building and had erected a large hut to provide shelter 
for any villagers that might come back. 

It is not only the homing instinct and old associations that 
bring the peasants back to the sites of their ruined houses ; 
they have a way of burying their money in the ground — all 
their little savings — and come to hunt for it. A pathetic 
sight. 

To realize some few of the problems of re-starting agri- 
cultural work in a war area, the following description given 
by one of our commissioners aids the imagination: 

"Our itinerary from Compiegne took us the first afternoon for 
several miles along the old fronts, and in addition to our obser- 
vation of the damage done to the towns of Servaise, Ollencourt, 
Traey-le-Val and Bailly, we had a most interesting opportunity 
to go into the old trenches of both armies. The amount of work 
done was prodigious, in a perfect network of trenches and com- 
municating trenches, all seven feet deep at the least. In many 
places elaborate underground houses of one room, two rooms 
and sometimes more had been made. Their roofs were arched 
with corrugated steel or with steel girders, over which there were 
several feet of earth. In some cases the floors and ceilings were 
of cement. In the case of the German dugouts and shelters, 
they were much more elaborate and comfortable than the French. 
We visited a group of such shelters built of huge logs with four 
feet of earth over them and the whole hidden in a thick wood 
behind high entrenchments. The Germans had electric lights in 
many places. They even had a bowling alley and little garden 
patches and flowers. So much grass had already grown up 
around these old trenches that the way is often hidden, and 
great care is needed in going about because of the danger of un- 
exploded shells and grenades. The French are forcing German 



34 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

prisoners to clean up and take out the logs and iron, etc., which 
are worth saving, and we saw much material stored up which 
had been salvaged in this way from these old trenches. 

"But where the land has been cut up by trenches and shelled, 
a great deal of filling in and levelling will have to be done be- 
fore it can be used again for agricultural purposes. We sup- 
pose these belts of 'no man's land,' including these trenches and 
shelled fields, will have to be left to the last in any case. Vast 
belts of barbed wire entanglements also stretch across the country- 
side in many places. These are perhaps thirty feet wide and the 
wires are supported on steel posts or 'horses' about three feet 
from the ground. These belts are being left for the present, and 
in some cases we saw the crops growing close up to both sides 
of them." 

Sermaize was the largest center of the English Friends 
Relief Work, and had about thirty workers stationed there. 
From this center many of them went out into the surround- 
ing districts with seeds, rabbits, and chickens to distribute, 
and with agricultural implements to lend, and in some cases 
to give. One hundred and fifty mowing machines, forty- 
two reapers and binders, five motor threshing-machines, and 
five horse-power threshing machines had been loaned or 
given to various villages in this way to be used by the entire 
community, or were being taken out and operated by Friend 
relief workers for the cost of the gasoline. They also had 
a Mogul tractor which pulled three plows and was in 
great demand during the plowing season. This depart- 
ment had distributed forty-five tons of potatoes for seed, in 
the spring of 1917, and would have distributed 200 tons, 
for which they had orders, if it had not been for delays due 
to congested traffic and to the fact that the French Depart- 
ment of Agriculture was overworked. 

This gives some idea as to need, and the ways which were 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 35 

already in operation to meet the need in France in the 
summer of 1917 when the American Friends' Service Com- 
mittee was preparing to come in and help. 

It is hard for those who have never lived in an invaded 
country to get a true picture of the state of France in the 
war zone at the time our work began, and harder still for 
those familiar only with American landscape and communi- 
ties to realize what France required in the way of restora- 
tion. J. Henry Scattergood, writing from Paris in July, 
1917, describes the Marne region as follows : 

" To a very large extent it is agricultural, but so far as we saw 
there is almost nothing that compares with our American farms. 
The land is divided up into a great number of small pieces — 
half an acre to one or two acres — which are individually owned, 
and apparently never fenced. One travels through these regions 
for miles at a time without seeing a house, although all of the 
land which is not wooded is or has been quite extensively farmed. 
The people's homes and barns are gathered together in villages, 
from which they go out to their farm operations, and to which 
they carry all their harvest crops, and in which they keep all their 
live-stock. The village street usually presents on either side an 
unbroken front of houses; to each one of these there is a large 
door, through which wagons loaded with hay can be driven. 
The dwelling is at the front, and is directly connected with 
various buildings back to a fair-sized barn in which hay, etc., is 
stored. In this bam or in the buildings between it and the house 
the live-stock is kept. The villages and towns range from those 
in which there is very little except the homes of the peasant 
farmers to very much larger towns having a considerable in- 
dustrial community in addition to the farming population. . . . 

''From what we can gather, by talking with our English 
Friends who have worked among them, the peasant class here 
is represented by no similar class at home. These small farmers, 
while they are hard-working and live very simple lives, are 



36 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

thoroughly self-respecting and self-supporting, and are said to 
have considerable savings. Few, if any, of the pauper class 
exist. Among them family ties are very strong, and unfortunate 
members of families are helped by their relatives." 

Many of the villages that had come in the direct range of 
the Battle of the Mame were nothing but shapeless heaps 
of rubbish. The method of destruction, though, very ex- 
pensive, was at least thorough. The few inhabitants who 
crept back like animals to their burrows could find no shel- 
ter except in the cellars underground. There, as civilians 
in the war-zone, they had to take their chance, until some 
foreign relief agency which had time for the job came and 
looked them up and saved them from dying of starvation 
and exposure. The English Ff lends were first in this field, 
though other organizations followed them. 

Some villages were only partly destroyed, and here the 
people naturally all crowded into the remaining houses, 
their numbers added to by those who fled from the entirely 
ruined villages. Problems of food and clothing, not to 
mention civilized living, became acute under these condi- 
tions. 

With farm machinery broken, farm-horses taken for mili- 
tary purposes and all the younger and able-bodied men 
away in the fighting ranks, despair and apathy fell on the 
naturally self -helping peasantry. They did not see how to 
begin life again. Their whole world was wrecked, and they 
did not know where to begin to re-make it. 

One of the greatest gifts brought to them by the Friends 
relief work was Hope. And the physical expression of that 
hope was tools for labor. Of those who gave the order for 
the deliberate destruction of the tools of the peasants in 
those villages occupied and destroyed by the invader, one 
can only say — ''Father, forgive them, for they knew not 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FBIENDS 37 

what they did/' To strike at the morale of an enejny 
country presents itself as legitimate to an imagination 
hardened by war to ignore the individual ; but what man, if 
he could catch the vision for a moment, could strike deliber- 
ately at the sanity, the mental and spiritual balance, the 
essential humanity of hundreds of innocent fellow- 
creatures ? 

The Society of Friends, "thinking nobly of che soul" and 
desiring to set spiritual restoration in the fore-front of their 
service, brought not only clothes and food and medical aid, 
but tools, and helpers who would work cheerily alongside 
and start going the work of the revival of civilization in the 
suddenly created desert. 

The Friends relief work was organized under four sec- 
tions, though each interlocked with, and closely co-operated 
with the others, — Medical, Relief work and industry, Recon- 
struction, and Agriculture. The people they had to help 
were divided into three classes — those who were living in 
the cellars or among the rubbish of their former homes in 
destroyed villages; the refugees who had fled from these 
villages to others less destroyed, or had fled before the Ger- 
man advance; the repatriated. These last wercpeople who 
had been caught behind the German lines by the first swift 
advance, or had been captured and sent there later, and 
were being returned by the Germans on account of their 
being too old or too young or too ill to be of any use. In 
the summer of 1917 these rapatries were coming through 
Switzerland at the rate of one to two thousand a day. 

Even with every facility, the work would have been hard 
enough to handle, but Henry Scattergood writes regarding 
the English Friends in the Marne : 

"Their problem is beset with very great difficulties, which must 
be experienced to be appreciated at their full value, but even 



38 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

a very brief contact with it shows how many hindrances there are 
to be overcome. Strange people with unfamiliar customs must 
be dealt with in a foreign language. Permission must be obtained 
from the military or other authorities for almost every journey 
and for every change of residence. Innumerable officials, high 
and low, local and at Paris, are to be consulted about every line 
of work. Movements of materials and all these other matters 
must be arranged through officials tremendously overworked and 
with resources overstrained by the war. Cooperation has to be 
arranged with numerous other relief societies, French and foreign, 
and necessarily giving precedence to military movements. Paci- 
fists and men of an age to fight who engage in civilian work 
are regarded with suspicion, and this is a recurring cause of 
trouble and delay. The work has to be done with inadequate 
facilities, often under very crowded and uncomfortable condi- 
tions, and last winter, which was unusually cold, under severe 
discomfort due to lack of fuel and poor houses. All these dis- 
couragements they seem to have met cheerfully, patiently and 
with persistent good judgment. They have among them men and 
women of a wide variety of training and background, doctors 
and nurses, architects, mechanics, farmers, social workers and men 
of multifarious business exiDcrience, as well as younger people 
recently out of school and college. All these seem perfectly 
willing to work along lines where their training may count, or 
for long stretches at humble and menial tasks, as occasion may 
demand. Everything they do seems to be inspired with a com- 
bination of untiring good-will and practical wisdom, which has 
secured them a firm place in the affections of the people whom 
they serve, and the highest praise from competent critics who 
have studied their work. In talking with us, as in their printed 
reports, they were very modest about their accomplishments and 
emphasized mistakes and failures to be guarded against, but we 
have seen enough to know that these must have been small in 
comparison with their successes. Out of a group of people, 
largely unknown to each other, from this wide variety of busi- 
ness and social experience, and of constantly changing individuals. 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 39 

they have organized themselves into an effective society which 
is doing its work so well that Dr. Van Schaick, who has known 
relief work in many lands, said that it was the best that he had 
ever seen." 

Many of the refugees crowded back into the larger towns 
a little behind the war zone, where they lived in great 
misery and squalor, having to pay from 20 to 50 francs a 
month for a small room, 12 by 15 feet, in which three to 
six people were forced to live together, slum-fashion, sleep- 
ing, cooking, eating, and working in the same place. The 
wretchedness of this kind of life was keenly felt by families 
who had been accustomed to comfortable independence. 
Often they were without the barest household necessaries 
in their cramped quarters, and for clothing had only the 
light summer garments in which they had made their flight. 

The Friends distributed adequate clothing and simple 
furniture to them as fast as possible, — a bed, small stove, 
simple wardrobe, and a few other things. As soon as these 
people found work — which, on account of the large annount 
of military work being done in the larger towns, most of 
them were quickly able to do — they paid for the furniture 
in installments. For the old people, or women who could 
not go out to work. Friends started some simple industries, 
especially a simple type of embroidery, done in bright 
coloured wools, designed by Margery Fry for women who 
were not already expert needlewomen. This embroidery 
** caught on" tremendously, and the English South Kensing- 
ton Museum asked for specimens of it as a sample of a new 
domestic art being started among the French. 

The work which was undertaken in 1914 involved vast 
expenditures of money which Friends in Great Britain, with 
some small help from America, gave v^th astonishing lib- 
erality. The group of workers which in the summer of 



40 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

1917 numbered 145, served entirely on a volunteer basis, 
they were infused with a wonderful spirit, they were greatly 
favored in the type of their leaders, they had the confidence 
of the French authorities and the French people and they 
made, as has been indicated, a profound impression upon 
all who saw the extent and quality of their work. In this 
inheritance it became the good fortune of American Friends 
to share. 

Tentative plans for a union of our proposed work with 
that of English Friends were already well under way when 
the cable and letter of July 11th were sent by our two 
commissioners. 

In a letter written on that date, Morris Leeds and Henry 
Scattergood said: 

"We have had two long conferences with the English Friends^ 
Executive Committee [i.e., the Paris Committee] for the discus- 
sion of this subject. They surprised and pleased us by making 
the suggestion that the American Friends be taken into their 
group on exactly the same standing as their own. They feel 
that this arrangement will present less difficulties than any less 
thorough-going method of cooperation. This does not mean 
that American and English Friends shall always be mixed in 
every enterprise. It may often happen that groups of workers 
will be chiefly or entirely of one or the other nationality or 
whether so made up or made up of an approximately equal 
mixture of the two, the groups will be represented in the same 
way on the Central Committee and the work will be coordinated 
by that Committee." 

This was the first proposal of the complete union of 
forces. It was a bold solution of the problem but it was 
the only right solution of it and we cannot be too thankful 
for the way in which it was both formulated and executed. 
Ernest P. Bicknell and Dr. John Van Schaick gave many 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 41 

important suggestions and much real help in working out 
the details of the scheme of co-operation which of course 
involved our connection with the Red Cross. 

"The English Friends' work is managed by an Executive Com- 
mittee that is comprised of either the President, T. Edmund 
Harvey, or his representative, of five members elected at large by 
the workers in France and of the Department heads. This Com- 
mittee meets once a month. There is also a General Committee 
that meets once in six months that is considerably larger and is 
an entirely elected body, the function of which is to discuss 
general policies. It does not appear to have any executive 
powers. The American workers coming into the work would have 
the same opportunity to vote for members on these committees 
and to themselves be members of the committees as the English 
workers have. 

We expect to go to England as soon as we can make the 
necessary arrangements to take this matter up with the London 
Committee. We should like to know to what extent you are 
willing to give us power to conclude an arrangement for Ameri- 
can Friends along these lines or any other lines that may seem 
to us advisable. We should like you to make these powers as 
broad as you feel you can. The above suggestion is liable to re- 
vision from a number of quarters although tentatively approved 
by the Executive Committee here. This was done at an informal 
meeting and before they can finally approve it, it has to be an- 
nounced to the membership at large and passed tentatively at a 
regTilar meeting of the Executive Committee. There is of course 
also a very good chance that it will have to be modified to meet 
the views of the Red Cross and a possibility that the Committee 
in London may make some objections although this is not ex- 
pected." 

Grayson Murphy wrote a letter to our commissioners on 
August 6th, 1917 in which he outlined the basis of co- 
operation in harmony with the general plan as above sug- 



42 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

gested. The American Friends Service Committee was to 
select, equip, transport and maintain at its own expense 
the personnel of the Friends Unit. This unit was to become 
a bureau of the Civilian Department of the Red Cross and 
at the same time was granted permission to merge with the 
English Friends to form the Anglo-American Mission of the 
Society of Friends. ''You would expect us," the letter 
says, "to assist you as far as possible in obtaining passes 
and permissions to carry on your work, and would also 
advise us of your needs in the way of funds or supplies so 
that we might, as far as possible, assist you in securing the 
funds or supplies that might be necessary for your opera- 
tions. We cannot of course commit ourselves as to the 
extent to which we could assist your Unit in these matters as 
the amount of assistance we could give would be determined 
by the extent of our resources and by the requirements of 
the various lines of work in which we may be engaged." 
Major Murphy closed his letter with these important words : 
' ' I am thoroughly in accord with your views as explained to 
me. I believe your work can be most effective and I assure 
you that it is not only my intention but my great desire that 
the American Red Cross organization here and at home 
should extend to your work the fullest and most sympa- 
thetic co-operation and support. ' ' 

The definite plan as it finally took shape and was adopted 
by the Paris Executive Committee, and was later accepted 
by the War Victims Committee and by the American Service 
Committee, was as follows : 

1. It is understood that American Friends will work under the 
auspices of the American Red Cross Commission, who will be 
asked to assign to the Friends' Unit in France workers selected 
by the American Friends' Service Committee for this purpose 
from amongst men holding conscientious objections to all war and 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 43 

women in sympathy with such views. The Friends^ Field Com- 
mittee to be the judge as to the number of such workers which 
it can usefully employ, subject to the approval of the London 
Committee. 

2. The American Red Cross Commission shall be invited to ap- 
point one of their number to attend meetings of the Friends' 
Field Committee in France. 

3. American and English Friends in France shall unite their 
work in one organization which shall be called — ^'Mission de la 
Societe des Amis." 

4. The American Friends' Service Committee shall be invited 
to send out two responsible Friends, a man and a woman, who 
shall be ultimately responsible to them and to the American Red 
Cross Commission for the welfare and conduct of American 
Friends sent to France. These two Friends shall be members of 
the French Field Committee. 

5. The work in France shall be directed by the French Field 
Committee, and by the Friends' Service Committee in America 
exercised through their representatives on the Field Committee. 
We suggest that the London Committee might invite a repre- 
sentative of the American Committee to join their number. 

6. The details of cooperation shall be reconsidered, if it is de- 
sired, after some months' work. 

7. We strongly urge our American Friends to adopt the gray 
uniform which is now so well known to the authorities and to the 
people amongst whom we work, and which is so definitely as- 
sociated with the non-military character of our work. It is also 
felt that a marked distinction of uniform will seriously prejudice 
the unity of our organization. 

I had during this period while plans were developing 
abroad many personal interviews with Henry P. Davison 
and with his subordinate helpers in Washington who had 
become thoroughly sympathetic with our aims and ready 
to forward our purposes in every way in their power. As 
soon as the definite plan was brought to shape in Paris H. P. 



44 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Davison heartily accepted it and always gave us his loyal 
support in the execution of it. His assistant Mr. Egan and 
his efficient secretary Mr. Foley rendered us so many 
services and gave us so much wise counsel out of their large 
experience that they deserve special mention in this place. 

The conference in London between our two commissioners 
and the War Victims Committee proved to be most satis- 
factory, London Friends showed much cordiality and the 
mutual plans went forward along the lines outlined above. 
The Red Cross officials both in Paris and Washington co- 
operated heartily in the formulation of the plan of union 
and thus, with a display of wisdom and insight on the part 
of all concerned, the famous triangular ''merger," to adopt 
an American commercial phrase, was finally arranged. 

The plan of union enabled us from the beginning of our 
foreign service to have the benefit of the long experience of 
the English workers, to enter into a group that had already 
''found itself" and to start on a far higher level than could 
have been possible if we had undertaken to launch a wholly 
new venture. The Red Cross officials saw the unusual ad- 
vantages of association with the English work as clearly as 
we did and they were eager to promote the union. From- 
our point of view the association with the American Red 
Cross was clearly essential to the working success of the 
plan. One of the gravest difficulties of relief work in 
France was the difficulty of securing permits to go to the 
devastated areas or in fact to go anywhere. Our difficulties 
in this matter were naturally increased by the fact that our 
workers were known to be in the main conscientious ob- 
jectors to war. Without the confidence and the backing of 
a great efficient organization, such as the Red Cross, it was 
not likely that permits could be secured. The English 
workers were experiencing more and more delay and were 



THE WORK OF ENGLISH FRIENDS 45 

finding the permit-difficulty an ever increasing one. Trans- 
portation of materials, equipment and supplies was another 
operation beset with heavy difficulties. In fact as the war 
went on and the complications increased it became perfectly 
evident that we could never have shipped our large stock 
of material from America to France, nor from Paris to the 
areas of service, without this close connection with the Red 
Cross, which treated us as a part of itself. 

About the time our arrangements for the services of the 
Haverford Unit were completed Homer Folks was made 
American Red Cross Director of Civil Affairs in France, so 
that our Bureau came under his direction and our intimate 
relations with this rare expert relief worker began. It was 
one more of the many pieces of good fortune with which 
we were favored. 

The beautiful co-operative spirit of the English workers 
in France is shown in a minute adopted by the Paris Execu- 
tive and sent to our Philadelphia Committee. It was as 
follows : 

"It is with the greatest pleasure that we have taken the op- 
portunity of merging our work with yours. If with three years 
of experience behind us we can be of assistance to you, you can 
be of equal assistance to us with your energy and fresh point of 
view. We can see how this has already been so, and how it will 
be still more so in the future. 

"We hope that this fusion of efforts in such truly Quaker 
service will be a means of binding Quakers from all the ends of 
the world still more closely together. American, British, Austra- 
lian and Canadian Friends are working out here side by side in 
the service of humanity, a circumstance that must afford an almost 
unique spectacle of spiritual unity. 

"We are sure that the common work of American and British 
Friends for the assistance of the stricken of a third country will 
help to obliterate the memory of our past misunderstandings and 



46 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

so point the way to a real brotherhood of Nations, far transcend- 
ing mere temporary alliances for the satisfaction of national 
ambitions." 

Thus I can bring to an end a very important chapter in 
the history of tlie development of the plans of the Friends 
Service Committee. 



CHAPTER V 

PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 

A STRENUOUS effort was made in Washington to have the 
Draft Law include a provision of exemption for persons 
who had sincere conscientious objections to military service. 
The men who drew up the Bill were afraid that such a pro- 
vision would offer an easy way of escape to cowards and 
** slackers." They saw no way to discriminate between 
the '^sincere" objector and the spurious one. They felt a 
certain amount of confidence in the honesty and sincerity 
of the religious denominations which had borne a long his- 
toric testimony against war and whose members had proved 
their faith in days past by patient suffering voluntarily un- 
dergone in its support. The Government, therefore, refused 
to go farther than to make some provision for the members 
of religious denominations whose fundamental principles 
were opposed and were known to be opposed to war. There 
were three well-known denominations to which the provi- 
sion applied : The Friends, the Mennonites and the Brethren 
or Dunkards, and there were a few other small sects which 
had a corresponding position. 

It soon appeared that the provision, which had been care- 
fully confined to members of religious denominations, did 
not really exempt even these persons from non-combatant 
military service. This point first became clear to us 
through a letter which Provost Marshal General Crowder 
wrote to me June 28th, 1917. He said : ' ' I have your letter 

47 



48 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

of June 25th in which you ask whether members of the 
Society of Friends who desire to go to France to engage in 
reconstruction work in devastated districts, can go abroad 
before the draft under the Selective Service Law and spec- 
ifically whether these persons will be liable to draft, and, if 
drafted, whether they can be granted exemption on the 
basis of the service in which they may be engaged in France 
and whether their exemption can be obtained by agents in 
the United States." General Crowder in his well known 
direct way proceeded to inform us that no person subject 
to draft was to be dealt with by "administrative action" in 
Washington since the exclusive power to determine upon 
exemptions rested with ' ' Exemption Boards. ' ' He further 
said that any person granted a permit to go abroad for re- 
lief service must return home at once if selected by his 
Board for military service. And finally he gave us this 
item of information: "It is true that there is a provision 
in the law for the exemption of persons who are members 
of religious organizations whose creed is opposed to war, but 
these persons are not exempted from non-combatant service. 
Whether the War Department will decide that service under 
the direction of the Red Cross is such non-combatant service 
as contemplated by law, I am unable to say. ' ' The clause in 
the Selective Service Law dealing with this particular mat- 
ter left to the President the decision of the question as to 
what should constitute non-combatant service, though, as 
G-eneral Crowder said, the problem was practically in the 
hands of the War Department. 

The day of the Draft was of course a memorable time and 
every member of the Unit at Haverford naturally watched 
the results with the keenest interest. A large number of 
the Unit men were drawn and we began at once to handle 
their cases. Henry J. Cadbury was called in to assist the 



PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 49 

officers of the service committee in this work arising in con- 
nection with the draft and his services in this connection 
were very important. He became an expert upon the 
delicate matters in his hands and he gave an immense 
amount of time and patient work to the affairs of the Unit. 
His services not only at this time but also throughout the 
following year were of a high order. 

In all matters concerning those who were subject to the 
draft William B. Harvey was a zealous and active worker. 
He was appointed Secretary of the Exemption Committee 
of Philadelphia Representative meeting (orthodox), for 
which service he was well fitted. He was possessed of 
abounding energy and he proved himself to be a warm and 
sympathetic friend to all who were exposed to suffering. 
He also did much to bring Friends and Mennonites into 
closer contact. It was our deepest desire in all this sphere 
of work to be thoroughly consistent with the principles of 
our faith. We could not settle problems of conscience for 
others than ourselves and we did not undertake to do so. 
We were providing for an extensive piece of civilian relief 
service in which we proposed to give a sphere of action for 
men who felt in their heart of hearts that they could not 
engage in war and who at the same time felt just as em- 
phatically that they could not meet the issue passively and 
do nothing to manifest their courage and their positive 
faith in the power of love. It seemed to us absolutely right 
to turn the energies of young Friends into this constructive 
work and to give them every possible opportunity to make 
in the midst of war and the desolations of war a great 
contribution of love. We did not consider our service a way 
of escape from military service nor (what was more import- 
ant) did we consider it a way of escape from a testimony 
of suffering to be borne in military prisons. At this stage 



50 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

we assumed, no doubt too hastily, that the President and the 
Exemption Boards would gladly recognize that our recon- 
struction work abroad was a voluntary and unforced type 
of non-combatant service, entirely satisfactory for the ful- 
filment of the provisions of the law. Very different ques- 
tions of policy and principle arose as the meaning of the 
draft provisions slowly unfolded, but in the first period our 
course of action seemed fairly clear and plain. 

We went, often in little groups of three, to talk over 
with Secretary of War Baker the problems confronting 
our men. These visits always ©ailed for a large amount of 
patience and for very quick action when the moment of 
opportunity came. Secretary Baker was a much sought 
man in those critical days. His ante-room was crowded 
usually to its utmost capacity. He would make a definite 
appointment with us to see him, perhaps at 10 o'clock in 
the morning. We were sure to be there on time. And we 
were also sure to find that there were many others too who 
had appointments. Gradually we would watch the group 
of visitors thinning away and see our turn approaching, 
when suddenly a delegation of senators would appear, or 
some army chief would come in, or the French Ambassador 
would enter and all our calculations would be upset. Occa- 
sionally we would make the discovery that Secretary Baker 
had just been called to a conference in the State Department 
or that he had received a visit through an inner door from 
the Secretary of the Navy. The slow hands of the clock 
would move round the dial and we still waited for our in- 
terview. At last, at about one o 'clock, the door would open 
and the little, short secretary, dynamic to his finger tips, 
would appear, give us a hearty welcome, somewhat vaguely 
answer our urgent queries and send us away with a hope 
that before long he could give us some definite light on the 



PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 51 

situation. It was on the occasion of these visits that we 
came to know Dr. F. W. Keppel who at this time was private 
secretary to the Secretary of War. Dr. Keppel was from 
the first exceedingly kind to us and always gave us generous 
attention and as much information and counsel as lay at 
his disposal. He was at a later period Third Assistant 
Secretary of War and our many relations with him in this 
position will be told in due time. 

In order to try every source which could give us any light 
upon the status of non-combatant service, we went to the 
White House one day and through the cordial co-operation 
of the President 's Secretary sent in to the President a writ- 
ten account of our ideals, our plans, and our purposes. We 
asked him to give us as much light as he could upon the 
important issues which were involved in our undertaking, 
especially whether our proposed work abroad would stand 
in his mind as the kind which he eventually intended to 
recognize as ''non-combatant service." To this communi- 
cation the President sent the following interesting reply : 

The White House 

Washington 

August 28, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Jones: 

I have received your letter of August 15th, with regard to the 
work of the reconstruction unit for relief and reconstruction work 
in the devastated war zones in northern France. 

The Secretary of War informs me that there will be no diffi- 
culty about the securing of passports for members of the unit, 
unless they are of draft age and included in the first draft, the 
rule being that any man who is not to be called in the first draft 
may leave the country upon the understandmg that he will re- 
turn should his services be later required. 

The question as to whether the work of these reconstruction 



52 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

units can be designated as non-combatant service for conscientious 
objectors cannot now be determined. The varieties of con- 
scientious objection developed in the application of the selective 
conscription law have been so numerous as to make it necessary 
to delay the establishment of a policy until we can be sure that 
we have both satisfied the requirements of the law and gone 
just as far as we can justly go in the recognition of the rights 
of individual conscience in such a matter. When the total number 
of persons interposing conscientious objection to military service 
has been ascertained, I hope to be able to work out with the 
Secretary of War a plan which will give the nation the benefit 
of the service of these men without injustice to the great com- 
pany of young men who are free to accept their country's call 
to military duty. 

In the meantime, I am sure you will permit me to express my 
deep appreciation of the reconstruction work proposed, and my 
happiness that it is being carried out in association with the 
Red Cross which is already doing a great work in France to ex- 
press the heart of America. 

Cordially yours, 

WooDROvp- Wilson. 

As the various ''rulings" were issued from the office of 
Provost Marshal General Crowder, it became steadily more 
clear that the apparent exemption provided by the Draft 
Act for Friends did not in fact secure them from actual 
military service. In view of the increasing seriousness of 
the situation our Committee called a conference of repre- 
sentative American Friends, which through a small com- 
mittee, drafted a document containing a definite proposal 
which we presented in person to Secretary Baker. The 
document was as follows: 

To Sec. Newton D. Baker, 
Dear Friend: 
We, the undersigned, are authorized by a conference of 



PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 53 

Friends, representing all sections of our religious Society in 
America, to submit this memorandum concerning the status of 
Friends under the provision of the Draft Act, which reads as 
follows : 

"And nothing contained in this Act shall be construed to i;e- 
quire or compel any person to serve in any of the forces herein 
provided for, who is found to be a member of any well recog- 
nized religious sect or organization at present organized and 
existing and whose existing creed or principles forbid its members 
to participate in war in any form, and whose religious convic- 
tions are against war or participation therein, in accordance with 
the creed or principles of said religious organization, but no per- 
son so exempted shall be exempted from service in any capacity 
that the President shall declare to be non-combatant." 

The following official ruling of Provost Marshal Gen. Crowder 
was issued August 11th on "the drafting of religious sects." 

"Persons considered under paragraph 'I^ of section 20 of the 
Regulations will be drafted, will be forwarded to a mobilization 
camp, will make part of the quota from the state and district 
from whence they come, and will be assigned to duty in a capacity 
declared by the President to be non-combatant." 

The rules and regulations prescribed by the President for Local 
and District Boards, issued June 30th provides in Section 48 
that, 

"From the time so specified (i.e., date of reporting at canton- 
ments) each man to whom such notice shall have been mailed shall 
be in military service of the United States." 

The effect of these two rulings in compelling Friends, who have 
been "called," to become a part of "the military service of the 
United States" has created a very grave situation for the members 
of our body. 



54 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Our objection to war is fundamentally religious. We are op- 
posed not only to the taking of human life but we are further 
prevented by our religious principles from participation in 
any military system or military service. It is the evident purpose 
of the above quoted provision of the law to recognize the re- 
ligious principles of bodies such as ours and to allow their 
members to render service consistent with their profound con- 
victions. We merely ask for an interpretation of the law which 
will give to our people the rights and privileges which are plainly 
implied in the words and spirit of the enactment. Our members 
of all ages are loyally ready to render a service in this world 
crisis commensurate with the tremendous needs of the time — 
only we cannot be recreant to the sacred ideals of our religious 
Society. 

We therefore present a plan adequately supported by precedent 
which offers a solution of our mutual problem. There has been 
formed a national committee, known as the American Friends 
Service Committee, representing all Friends in the United States, 
for the purpose of finding fields of service for the members of 
our body. We respectfully propose that this Committee be 
authorized by you to find service of national importance for all 
Friends who have obtained certificates of discharge under the 
Rules and Regulations prescribed by the President. This Com- 
mittee pledges itself to find forms of service, to be approved 
by the President, for all such men. A course similar to the one 
here proposed has been taken by the British Government in the 
present war. By an arrangement with the War Department all 
Friends are given the privilege of accepting service under the 
Friends' Ambulance Committee or under the Friends' War Vic- 
tims Relief Committee and thereby of being excused from mili- 
tary service. Our Government through President Lincoln made a 
somewhat similar arrangement during the Civil War by which 
Friends were allowed to do hospital and relief work for f reedmen 
under the Friends Committees as an alternative to military serv- 
ice. The American Friends Service Committee has already 
worked out plans for extensive reconstruction work in France 



PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 55 

and in other stricken countries and it is now preparing to send 
to the Continent of Europe a trained body of men known as 
the American Friends Reconstruction Unit of the Red Cross 
No. 1. This reconstruction of the desolated war-zones is work 
already recognized by the President as a part of our national 
obligation to Europe and would seem to be suitable service for 
men who cannot fight. 

We can rapidly follow up this first Unit with many similar 
ones, while for those Friends who are not fitted for this type 
of work we can find many other fields of service at home or 
abroad, such as Camp Y. M. C. A. work, social service in the 
crowded areas where munition workers live, work in the canteens, 
and in many other forms of constructive activity. 

With the most sincere purpose and with the deepest loyalty 
we urge that this or some other way be taken which shall ade- 
quately meet deep-seated conviction and which shall enable us 
to serve our country and our fellow men without violating our 
consciences and our sacred faith. 

We are respectfully your friends. 

The wheels moved very slowly in Washington, particu- 
larly in connection with matters which did not vitally assist 
in winning the war, and we had to learn to wait often 
many months for results, but results, sometimes different 
from what we expected, did eventually come from our 
efforts. 

As, however, it became ** borne in upon us" that we were 
not likely to get any decision from Washington in time to 
affect the members of the Haverford Unit who hoped to 
sail for France by the middle of September, we turned our 
attention to the immediate practical problem of getting per- 
mits from the Local and District Exemption Boards, so that 
our men could get passports to leave the country for their 
service. Wherever it was possible to do so, we had the 
individual members of the Unit transfer their case from 



56 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

their home Boards, scattered as they were all over the 
United States, to Boards within easy reach of Philadelphia, 
so that we and they could deal with their problems in per- 
son. All Boards in the country with one exception granted 
transfers to the men. Provision for such transfer had been 
made in the ** rulings" of the Provost Marshal, which "rul- 
ings" we studied as though our life depended on them. In 
all these legal matters Vincent Nicholson, our Executive 
Secretary, was very much at home and gave indispensable 
help. The transfers and the subsequent transactions with 
the Boards involved the filing of almost innumerable affi- 
davits, all of which I, as chairman of the committee, had to 
affirm to before a Notary. Each member filed with the 
Local Board which had the administration of his case an 
application for permit to leave the United States. The 
application blank was as follows: 

I, , hereby certify 

that I am years old, that I reside at 



In accordance with the compiled rulings of the Provost Marshal 
General, No. 2, dated July 30, 1917, Form 24, Section (d), I 
hereby respectfully apply through you for a permit from the 
District Board to leave the United States. I am a duly ap- 
pointed member of the American Friends Reconstruction Unit 
of the Red Cross as indicated by the certificate filed herewith, 
and I desire to leave the United States as soon as possible for 
reconstruction work in France. 

I respectfully ask that you call me for physical examination 
and receive any claims for exemption or discharge which I may 
make in accordance with the provisions of above-mentioned ruling 
governing permits for passports. 

Will you kindly forward this apphcation with the letter of your 
approval and the other papers in my case to the District Board, 
calling its attention to the statement of the said ruling that "the 



PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 57 

District Board will make its decision with the greatest 

possible expedition." 

The permit when issued should be sent to the applicant at his 
above-mentioned address. 

Signed 

The Local Boards generally granted permits for all our 
men who were so far down in the Draft list that there was 
no likelihood that they would be included in the first Draft. 
They also granted permits to men who were rejected on 
physical grounds which were often technical and which did 
not incapacitate the person for our type of service. A man 
with an imperfect eye which made his aim inaccurate for 
shooting could perfectly well build houses for French refu- 
gees. They further granted conscientious members of the 
Society of Friends exemption from combatant service. 
(Form 174.) They usually approved the request of our 
men for permission to engage in the Reconstruction Work. 
The final decision, however, rested with the District Boards 
which alone were authorized to pass upon claims of exemp- 
tion on the ground that the applicant was engaged in other 
forms of service *'of national importance." 

There were at first no definite '^ rulings" which unequiv- 
ocally settled the question as to what constituted ''work of 
national importance." Very large discretion was given to 
the District Boards in this matter. We endeavored to con- 
vince the District Boards, before whom the cases of our men 
came for decision, that they should be given exemptions and 
permits on the ground that they could not in any case serve 
in a military capacity and that they could render a genuine 
national service by "expressing," in President Wilson's 
phrase, ''through their work in France the heart of Amer- 
ica." The members of the Boards generally felt that this 
was the easiest solution of a difficult and complicated prob- 



58 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

lem, but they were all overwhelmed with work, so busy that 
they hardly had time to eat or sleep, and of course much 
more concerned to fill up their draft quotas than to decide 
cases like these of ours. The consequence was that the 
decisions dragged along through weary weeks at just the 
moment when we wanted to book our sailings for France 
and get the first Unit at its task. Only those of us who 
worked at this job will ever be in a position to know how 
seemingly insoluble the whole thing was. 

When the time came for the Unit to sail we had received 
favorable decision on all but eleven cases. These eleven 
men had to see their companions go without them, though I 
always expected, as I told the men then, to see them follow 
after a short interval of patient waiting and discipline. We 
found temporary homes and work for them on the Westtown 
farm and kept busily working on for their permits, which 
at last all came through on a memorable day. Only one 
of them still had ' ' lions ' ' in his path. This was Von Darwin 
Amick from Kansas. The "Von" in his name presented 
what seemed an insuperable obstacle to a passport. The 
good man was not a German and we had plenty of evidence 
that when his Kansas parents named him the ''Von" was 
spelled Vaughn, but the boy had formed the habit of spell- 
ing it '*Von" and now it lay between him and friendly 
service in France. The case involved a vast correspond- 
ence, many affidavits and some journeys to Washington. 
At length through a personal visit to the French Embassy 
we secured a permit for our Kansas Friend who was en- 
couraged by the officials in Washington and by us to write 
his name henceforth V. D. Amick! 

Thus every man of the Haverford hundred got passports 
except the one man whose Local Board in Indiana refused 
to the last either to transfer him or to grant him a permit. 



PROBLEMS OF THE DRAFT 59 

This was A. N. Reynolds, of Mooresville.^ We fortunately 
had no intimation at this time that far greater problems 
than any we were then encountering were soon to arise in 
connection with drafted Friends in all parts of the country, 
but that is a later story and must wait until its turn comes 
in a future chapter. 

1 Jesse N". Griffith of Richmond, Ind., was prevented from going 
to France by illness in his family at home, though he had a passport. 



CHAPTER VI 

GETTING UNDER WAY 

Feeling that we should need a large equipment of tools 
I made out a list of fundamentals and took it to H. P. 
Davison on July 23rd to see whether the American Red 
Cross would give us our initial set of supplies. Mr. Davi- 
son read the list, asked me a few incisive questions with his 
usual directness, then rang for a stenographer and dictated 
the following cable to Grayson Murphy which was my first 
experience of expansive cabling, regardless of the number 
of words : 

"Chairman Jones of Haverford, Pa., reports excellent progress 
of unit. Expecting one hundred men will be in prime condition 
to sail about September first to undertake rehabilitation work 
along lines of work now being done by English Friends. He 
suggests they should have in France upon their arrival the fol- 
lowing : 

Number Implements 

2 Tractors 

2 Tractor Plows 

2 Syracuse No. 278 horse plows 

1 or 2 (60 tooth) spike harrows 

2 Tractor harrows (International) 

1 Land roller 

2 Disc drills, Ontario or Superior 
2 Reaper and binder, McCormick 

Case thresher 

Hoes, rakes, axes, shovels, forks for each man 
60 



GETTING UNDER WAY 61 

Spring tooth harrow (17 Tooth) 

Plowshares and other repairs 
3 Complete kits of carpenter tools, hammer, saw, hatchet 

for each man 
1 Auto truck ear 
1 Large car for transporting men 
1 Small car for errand service 

"Furthermore, at least one hundred portable houses to be made 
in this country to cost between four hundred and six hundred 
dollars. He informs us that he is working along lines suggested 
by Scattergood and Leeds. It is contemplated that unit can do 
effective work in getting out lumber from Jura regions thus en- 
abling them to construct many temporary houses next spring. 
Please advise promptly whether program meets your approval. 
If so undoubtedly we will proceed to adopt Friends' suggestion." 

We soon found that it was much better to build the porta- 
ble houses in France than to buy them here and transport 
them, and we substituted the purchase of saw mill and 
planing mill machinery for the ready made houses. Major 
Murphy by cable of July 27th, heartily approved our equip- 
ment as specified and we were authorized to go ahead with 
the purchases, though eventually many changes were made 
in the details. The smaller implements were bought in 
Philadelphia and sent to Haverford to be packed, to which 
we added a surveyor's and a photographer's outfit and a 
large supply of medical and surgical material. The last 
days at Haverford were occupied in making great packing 
boxes with rope handles and in packing the entire outfit 
for the Unit. Each man was allowed to carry 300 pounds, 
if it did not occupy more than 20 cubic feet. Three months' 
food supply for the entire unit was bought in Philadelphia, 
and was expected to be shipped simultaneously with the 
sailing of the men. Just at this time came a great slump 



62 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

in the efficiency of railroad transportation. It became al- 
most impossible to get anything to New York or across New 
York after it reached the city. We resorted to motor 
trucks for our most urgent material and the night before 
the Unit sailed, these unique boxes of supplies and vast 
stacks of duffel bags went off at ten o 'clock at night in the 
general direction of New York with volunteer workers on 
top of the loads to guard them and steer them. 

The next morning (September 4th) almost before light 
the men set out for Haverford station. There were still 
duffel bags enough left to fill a railroad car. We shifted 
them from one train to the other through the windows of 
the cars in the Philadelphia station and then, with deep 
emotions on both sides, the Unit set forth for New York 
leaving the rest of us behind. There were many left-over 
tasks to be finished after the men were actually gone. Some 
of the boxes which had been sent to New York by express 
missed the boat. The Bochamhecm, went astray and had to be 
searched for in the wilderness of concentrated freight and 
express that characterized the New York of those days. 
The food supplies were subjected to one delay after another. 
We were inexperienced in the art of shipping and we tried 
to do the impossible. The one consolation we had was to see 
how confused and chaotic were the shipping plans and 
methods of all the other agencies of relief, even the 
greatest ones, and in the light of our early trials and blun- 
ders we slowly worked out a good reliable system. Arthur 
H. Thomas, of Haverford, out of his large experience, gave 
us much help in our search for lost things and in our efforts 
to get our food and mill machinery on the steamers, and he 
also gave important assistance in the formulation of new 
and better methods. We selected Arthur C. Jackson, of the 
Miller Lock Co. to be purchasing agent for all our future 



GETTING UNDER WAY 63 

supplies and to oversee the shipping, to whose efficient 
labors the Service Committee owes a large debt of gratitude. 
About this time Samuel J. Bunting, Jr., became assistant to 
our Executive Secretary and gave a great variety of service 
both in the office and by a multitude of journeys to New 
York, sometimes in order to forward shipping, sometimes 
to escort parties of workers bound for France. At the same 
time Rebecca Carter of Germantown was appointed secre- 
tary of Women's work both at home and abroad. This ex- 
tensive work of the women and the part taken by the secre- 
tary for this branch of service will be dealt with in a future 
chapter. While we were working out our plans at home 
and getting ready to dispatch the first Unit, J. Henry Scat- 
tergood was very busy completing the plans in France for 
the effective utilization of the workers when they should 
arrive. In conjunction with the English Friends he had 
studied the house building work at Dole in the Jura and 
had decided to establish another center, like the one at 
Dole, for manufacturing ^ * demontahle" houses. After a 
careful investigation of possible localities for the new 
** plant," a contract was made with a manufacturer in the 
interesting and charming village of Ornans, in the depart- 
ment of Doubs, for the use of his factory, situated on the 
banks of the Loue River. A building which had been for- 
merly used for the manufacture of absinthe was taken over 
to be used as living headquarters for the men. The machin- 
ery for the planing mill and some of the saw mill machinery 
were bought in America and were among the congested 
freight supplies in New York, over which we exercised so 
much agony. An empty factory with no adequate machin- 
ery to work with in a remote French village, did not appeal 
to anybody and all who were concerned worked almost fran- 
tically to push forward the shipping of this needed material. 



64 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

According to the original plan we expected the Haver- 
ford Unit to go directly to Omans for their first stage of 
work. Dr. Babbitt was to be their Director and Ralston 
Thomas was to be his assistant, and we had assumed in a 
general way that these men would keep together and work 
as a unit. While they were at sea, on their way to France, 
all the plans on the other side were recast, by the unex- 
pected opening for work in the Somme section, i. e. in the 
devastated area released by the famous Hindenburg re- 
treat of 1917. This new plan meant the division of the 
Unit into many small groups, each group of Americans 
to be merged with a corresponding group of English work- 
ers, thus forming a small eqiiipe for each devastated village. 
Some of the workers were detailed to go to Dole ; some to 
equip and prepare the mill at Ornans ; some to work in the 
Marne valley and some to go, as indicated above, into the 
Somme. It was arranged for Dr. Babbitt to create and 
manage an extensive hospital for civilian patients in the 
Marne Valley at Sermaize. This sudden transformation 
of all our plans is only one illustration of the immense 
difficulty which we had of ever telling in advance what our 
future activities were to be. Many times during the two 
years all arrangements, carefully made, for an existing sit- 
uation had to be instantly thrown aside and a new start 
made to fit an unexpected emergency. 

It was never possible to get a great number of berths on 
any one French steamer. The largest group we ever sent 
at one time was the famous Rochambeau group with Dr. 
Babbitt, which consisted of fifty-one men and three women. 

Weary and travel-worn after a sleepless night on deck, 
passing through the submarine zone, and another sleepless 
night in third class railroad carriages en route from Bor- 
deaux, fifty-four members of the American Friends Recon- 



GETTING UNDER WAY 65 

struction Unit No. 1, tumbled out of the train Saturday 
morning, September 14th, and greeted Paris. Henry Scat- 
tergood, and half-a-dozen of the English Friends, as well as 
part of a group of thirteen who had arrived a week earlier, 
were at the Quai d'Orsay station to meet them. The fifty- 
one men and three women scattered to their hotels, to re- 
gather in the evening at the splendid new Red Cross Head- 
quarters in the old Auto Club in the Place de la Concorde. 

Some of them slept during the day; all were hollow-eyed 
and tired when they met at the Red Cross Headquarters. 
They came away refreshed and inspired. Henry Scatter- 
good, the American Friends' Commissioner; T. Edmund 
Harvey, President of the English work in France; and 
Homer Folks, Director of the Division of Civil Affairs of 
the Red Cross, spoke so eloquently of the work before them 
that the travellers who came with minds filled with the diffi- 
culties in France, returned fired with the consecrated spirit 
of these men. It is impossible to reflect the religious spirit 
of that meeting in words, or to report the joy with which the 
ship-worn group felt the spirit of the men with whom they 
were to work. Behind the words here reported stood three 
great, warm, human men. 

"I am glad to welcome you here in this happy combina- 
tion of the American Red Cross, the English Friends and 
our American Friends Reconstruction Unit," said Henry 
Scattergood, in opening the meeting. "We rejoice in this 
international effort in which representatives of England and 
Aanerica join to help their sister nation, France. We owe 
our privilege of being here at all to our rich inheritance 
from our ancestors in England and America who have 
fought for freedom of conscience the world over. . . . We 
are here because we feel we must do something, not expect- 
ing an easier life than the millions of men who are following 



66 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

their light in other ways, and we are ready to do the hardest 
and lowliest kind of work. It is not that our blood is any 
less red or our patriotism any less real, it is that we are con- 
scious that we are servants of a King who is above all 
nations — the King of Love, and that we must live out His 
Gospel of Love. It is not for us to talk, it is for us to work, 
and in our work to show the power of good- will even in 
these terrible times. We are guests of France, a nation 
which in its hour of trial has made itself admired and 
loved throughout the world. We must come prepared, not 
to criticise, not to modernize, not to change, but to help 
France as she wants us to help her, humbly and as best 
we can. We Friends have a special responsibility because 
of our views, and must be careful strictly to follow all the 
conditions under which the work has been permitted by the 
authorities. The whole Friends' expedition might be im- 
perilled by the wilful or careless act of any individual 
which might lead to distrust by the officials, and every 
member is placed upon his sense of honor for the highest 
standards of conduct. I can hope for nothing better than 
that we should rise to the level of service of the English 
Friends with whom we are now merged, who have under- 
taken the work in a deep religious spirit. Our privilege is 
to unite the experience and standing of the English Friends 
with the enthusiasm and personnel of the American Friends 
and the influence and backing of the Red Cross. Won- 
derful possibilities open before us, the limits to which are 
set simply by what we ourselves make of them." 

T. Edmund Harvey was introduced by Henry Scatter- 
good as ''a man whose knowledge of French life, language 
and manners made possible that confidence on the part of 
French officials upon which the whole work has been built 
up ; whose ideals and whose life of love have come from liv- 



GETTING UNDER WAY 67 

ing very close to his Master ; whose strength is in gentleness, 
whose character has molded the spirit of all the workers; 
whose presence is an inspiration, and who is beloved by all 
who know him." 

*'We have been looking forward to this influx of new 
life," said T. E. Harvey, ''and to the Red Cross making it 
possible for you to work along with us, with their guidance 
and help. The splendid motto of the Red Cross, 'Inter- 
Arma Caritas,' stands for the constructive element, build- 
ing up, conserving, re-creating, in the midst of war. It is 
a great thing to try to live up to that motto every day. By 
the very nature of the trust imposed upon us, we cannot 
speak as we might in times of peace of some aspects of our 
faith, but we can in our work demonstrate some aspects 
of humanity and brotherhood, lessen a little the terrible 
bitterness of war, and bring something of the spirit of com- 
radeship and love, into lives bruised and battered by the 
wrong that has been done. We have tried to make the 
ideals of service real in our work. We are all comrades 
and brothers working together, very democratically organ- 
ized, ready — even men used to positions of responsibility — 
to accept in the spirit of comradeship humble duties else- 
where called menial and lowly, but which have, rightly seen, 
a divine meaning. You will carry with you the honor 
of the Quaker name and of the American Red Cross, and 
you will go as representatives of America into districts 
where no American has ever been seen. You will go as 
representatives of a vision, of a way of life. I am 
sure that you will every one be worthy of the call that 
comes to you from the need of France and the need of hu- 
manity." 

It was a rare tribute which Homer Folks, the Red Cross 
official in charge of all American civilian relief work in 



68 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

France, paid to the English Friends. ''The Red Cross 
looks on the Society of Friends as in a sense its expert 
leaders, ' ' he declared. ' ' There is no group of people from 
whom we have learned so much, or from whom we expect 
to learn so much, as the Friends. ' ' Then he added a piece 
of advice. ''Leave behind on the boat," he said, "all par- 
ticular recognition of what you represented at home, and 
go about it simply as work to be done. You derive your 
impulse to this work from your very beautiful faith. The 
first thing to learn is to be tremendously tolerant and re- 
member that the people you will help have a very different 
religion and draw from it certain very different conclu- 
sions. You will find, too, some to whom politics and religion 
are the same thing, but who are animated by as deep and 
genuine an interest in human welfare. This is the most 
tremendously fascinating, stimulating, developing, oppor- 
tunity human beings were ever called on to meet, and it can 
be met only in a simple-minded human way without any tags 
or hyphens." 

For the members of the Unit Dr. Babbitt replied, "We 
come absolutely ready to do any service of any kind which 
may be assigned to us. ' ' 

After an intermission for coffee and cakes — ^the members 
of the Unit were astounded by the abundance of good food 
in France— Margery Fry, of the Social Service Department, 
Edward G. West, of the Agricultural Department, and Wil- 
frid Shewell, Secretary of the English Friends' work in 
France, explained a series of stereopticon pictures of the 
work in the Marne district. 

Besides giving the incoming band of workers this royal 
welcome which touched everybody's heart, the tried and 
true English workers gave them the following written mes- 
sage of good- will : , 



GETTING UNDER WAY 69 

"We, the English members of the Fl-iends War Victims Re- 
lief Expedition in France, send a word of warm welcome to the 
American Friends who have come to share our work with ns. 
It is with the greatest pleasure that we greet those, who, sepa- 
rated from us by such great distance, share with us the same 
ideals and aspirations. We rejoice in this opportunity for a 
united Quaker effort in the service of humanity. We invite you 
gladly to join us in our efforts and hopes, successes and failures. 

"It may be that some of you will be discouraged at finding 
yourselves located, for a time at any rate, in a district which 
shows no signs of the great struggle, and that you will long to be 
placed in more direct contact with those whose sufferings are 
more evident. It may be your lot to do work which is in itself 
monotonous and uninteresting, as indeed has been the case with 
many of us who have preceded you. We hope that you may see, 
as we have seen, that it matters little what our particular work 
may be, so long as we help forward the cause of international 
good fellowship, and the ideal of constructive service which we 
all have at heart. The dullness of the work is part of the sacri- 
fice which is entailed in the service we wish to render and in the 
witness we would make to our faith. 

"In the districts devastated by the war you may be disheart- 
ened by the immense mass of suffering and the smallness of the 
help it is possible to give. There is nothing we have felt more 
acutely ourselves during our three years out here. But along with 
this feeling of helplessness we have learnt something of the op- 
posite. At a time when people are thinking in continents, in 
millions of lives and hundreds of millions of money, we have 
lived in small villages among humble people, doing unsensational 
though interesting work; we have come to see that personal sym- 
pathy and genuine understanding are all the more welcome at a 
time when individual personality is generally unconsidered. 

"We hope and believe that you will share with us the love 
we feel for the peasants of France. Their civilization and their 
view of life is very different from ours, still more different per- 
haps from yours. It is a civilization which has great respect 



70 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

for symbols, which is full of small reverences and what may ap- 
pear almost foolish sensibilities. But these reverences and sensi- 
bilities, when understood, are the keys that open to us the innate 
gladness and good fellowship of the French people. They are 
at present struck down by misery almost past bearing. There 
is hardly a family that has not lost two, three or even more of 
their nearest in the war. But still from under this suffering 
springs up at times their old inherent gaiety, to enjoy which 
is one of the pleasures of our work which we wish you to share 
with us. 

"During the last three years we believe that those we have 
been trying to help have come to appreciate the spirit in which 
our work is given. Certainly ^Les Amis' are known in districts 
far beyond the limits of their activities. We can assure you a 
welcome, not only from ourselves, but from the people among 
whom you will live, and we believe that the work before you 
will be not only useful, but an experience which ever afterwards 
you will be glad to have known. 

"Signed on behalf of the workers in France, 

"T. Edmund Harvey, 
"Wilfrid Shewell, 
"Francis L. Birrell." 

Everybody fell in heartily with the new plan. Dr. Bab- 
bitt showed the finest possible spirit. It was obviously not 
possible for him under the new arrangement to be American 
Director of the Unit. He was confronted with a medical 
task which called for all his boundless energies and at the 
same time the Unit itself was broken up into many frag- 
ments and merged into complete union with the English 
workers, under the immediate direction of the Paris Execu- 
tive Committee and its officers. Under the plan of triangu- 
lar cooperation the following working system was adopted 
with officers as indicated below. 



GETTING UNDER WAY 71 

Chairman in France — T. Edmund Harvey. 
Secretary in France — Wilfrid Skewell. 
Treasurer in France — Ralph Elliott. 

Address: 53 Rue de Rivoli, Paris. 
Chairman in En^dand — William Albright. 
Secretary in England — A. Ruth Fry. 

Address: Ethelburga House, Bishopsgate, London. 
Chairman in U. S. A. — Rufus M. Jones. 
Secretary in U. S. A. — Vincent D. Nicholson. 

Address: 20 S. 12th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
Representative in France of American Friends Service Com. — 

J. Henry Scattergood. 
Representatives of Red Cross on Executive Committee — Homer 

Folks, Director of Dept. of Civil Affairs; J. Henry Scatter- 
good, Chief of Bureau of Friends Unit. 
Friends Representative on Red Cross Commission: 

J, Henry Scattergood, Chief Bureau of Friends Unit. 
Heads of Departments: 

Medical — Dr. Hilda Clark, Maternity Hospital, Chalons-sur- 

Mame, c/o American Red Cross. 
Relief — S. Margery Fry, "La Source," Sermaize, Mame. 
Agriculture — E. G. West, "La Source," Sermaize, Marne. 
Building — Harold E. Trew, 20 Ave. Victoria, Paris. 
Manufacture of Houses — Norman H. Brooks, Dole, Jura. 

J. Henry Scattergood who had gone to France as a tem- 
porary commissioner felt compelled to return home and in 
the latter part of the summer v^^e realized very keenly that 
we must have a highly qualified man to take the positions 
temporarily filled by him. We knew at once whom we 
wanted to have to fill this important executive field-position, 
but we could not at that time get this particular Friend for 
our service as he felt that he could not honorably drop the 
responsible work which he was then doing. His turn was 



72 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

however to come later, as we shall see. Other men occurred 
to us who were well qualified and we spent much earnest 
thought before we made the selection of the man for this 
task. Our choice fell upon Charles Evans, of Riverton, 
New Jersey. We greatly feared he could not leave his own 
business affairs at such a critical time and we knew how 
hard it would be for any man to leave behind for a year 
or more a wife and family of three children. On one of our 
visits to Washington we decided that the time had come to 
ask Charles Evans to go. We sent him a telegram from 
Washington asking him to come down to Wilmington, Del- 
aware, to meet us on our returning train in the evening. 
He came as requested. We laid our weighty concern upon 
him as the train covered the distance between the two cities 
and when we got off in Philadelphia he had consented to 
go to Prance if he could make the necessary arrangements 
at home and in his business, which he believed he could do, 
and which he quickly did. It was one of those divinely 
guided steps, which have so often marked Quaker under- 
takings in the past. Charles Evans was the right man for 
the work we had in hand and he gave himself to it without 
any reservations. He sailed for France with a group of 
workers September 16th, twelve days after the main body 
of workers had left on The Rochamheau. 

After visiting the equipes and living for some time with 
the groups of workers in the winter of 1918-1919, I wrote 
the following impression of the success of the experiment of 
joining forces together. 

"At first the amalgamation was not easy: both groups 
were Anglo-Saxon and they were both in the main composed 
of Friends, but at the same time both groups had marked 
traits of difference. Habits of thought, forms and accents 
of speech, typical difference in native humor, characteristic 



GETTING UNDER WAY 73 

preferences for kinds of food, and many other contrasts, 
separated the men, in spite of the fact that they were 
merged together on paper and by their common aim. The 
English workers were older, maturer, and settled in their 
more or less fixed ways of work and life. Our men were 
often hardly more than boys. They were full of zest and 
enthusiasm. They were ready for any amount of work, but 
they were American, first, last and all the time. Their 
national characteristics could not be mistaken. They were 
used to their own Western ways, fresh, breezy, unconven- 
tional, and they could not change much more easily than 
the leopard could change his spots, or the Ethiopian his 
skin. Speaking frankly, there were many frictions, and 
there were the usual difficulties which attend international 
marriages! There are letters in the archives of the Phila- 
delphia Committee which relate how some Americans viewed 
some English co-laborers, and there are letters in the Lon- 
don archives which express moods and attitudes toward the 
curious American cousins. 

' ' Time has gone by, the workers have lived together, toiled 
together, suffered together, laughed and wept together and 
they have become a united group. Each has learned from 
the other. There has grown up a fine spirit of give and 
take. I heard mam^ English Friends say unreservedly that 
the union of forces had been a great satisfaction and bless- 
ing to them, and I heard many expressions from our Amer- 
ican workers of the rich and positive fruits that had come 
to them through the intercourse, the co-operation and the 
fellowship. The religious meetings together have formed 
one valuable feature of the association, and the frequent 
discussion of life aims and national ideals has been another 
large asset. 

**At first the work of direction and management was 



74 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

largely in the hands of English workers, especially the 
executive positions, the headship of departments and the 
leadership in the local equipes. This was, of course, wholly 
as it should have been. As our workers gained in skill and 
insight and revealed their gifts and qualities, they grad- 
ually won important positions of headship and direction, 
and they have in the later period had their full share 
in the management of the Mission. It is in every way a 
joint work and a 'conjunct' undertaking. The experiment 
has ' worked ' as we say in America, it has ' answered ' as the 
English phrase it. The comradeship, the fellowship in work 
and life will be among the happy memories which the groups 
from both countries will take home with them when the 
Mission closes this union in France, and will have done 
much to cement for the future English and American 
Quakerism. ' ' 

More important, however, than a visitor's impression is 
the settled judgment of the workers themselves. The fol- 
lowing testimony of E. Roy Calvert, writing from Varennes 
in the autumn of 1919, is a good specimen of the t3^pe of 
view we have been getting from workers both English and 
American : 

"The work, which is now drawing to a close, has been a large 
one, and our personnel has been extensive. We have seen the 
gathering together of men and women entirely different in ways 
of life, ideas, and national characteristics. We have worked to- 
gether in little groups, shared in the same primitive conditions, 
and come into very intimate contact. We have pooled our 
thoughts and ideals, and have met in the fellowship of the same 
Meeting for Worship. 

"At first our differences seemed acute, and no doubt some of 
us have separated and gone off to our homes without ever rising 
above them. Gradually, however, almost unconsciously, there has 



GETTING UNDER WAY 75 

come to most of us the experience of a fellowship which, tran- 
scending our surface differences, has bound us together in the 
bonds of a spiritual unity. Our differences have not disappeared, 
nor become absorbed in the mass, but in the warmth of a common 
fellowship our individual characteristics have been uplifted and 
purified, and fitted into the scheme of the whole. 

"This cooperation between Friends in England and America 
has been more than a material one. To some of us at least it 
has entered into the very sanctuary of the spiritual. 

"And now one by one we are separating, to England and across 
the seas; but this fellowship between us must not die. Other 
fields of service are opening up in Poland, Serbia and elsewhere, 
and we must share that work together. But the question is larger 
than this. I write as an Englishman who feels the strength of 
the forces which are seeking to alienate our two countries. Does 
not the call come to all those who name the name of Friend 
to witness to the spiritual oneness of all peoples'? We have 
shared in this great work together, and have a great love one for 
the other. God grant that in whatever new endeavors he may 
call us, we may still be united in that tie which is strongest of all 
ties, the warm tie of such a fellowship as we have known here 
in France." 

One other interesting item belongs in this chapter, de- 
voted to getting under way. This was the generous appro- 
priation of 533,000 francs made to our relief work by the 
American Red Cross in France. This was to cover a 
specified budget which included many lines of activity, such 
as the Chalons maternity hospital, the construction of 
houses, the cost of furniture for the houses, the purchase 
of farm machinery and more motor cars. Out of this fund 
came also the sums required to prepare and equip the new 
hospital which Dr. Babbitt and his band of helpers created 
in the Chateau at Sermaize. When Henry Scattergood left 



76 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the field of his labors in October to come home, the work was 
well launched, and the success of it seemed assured. 

I have necessarily had much to say of the leaders and 
organizers of this enterprise. It should, however, be said 
emphatically that the spirit of the rank and file of the 
workers themselves was the greatest and most signal feature 
of the Unit. They made the success of the undertaking. 
They gave themselves to it with abandon and worked with 
real consecration for the ends we all had in view. Much 
of the work they did was monotonous and dull, far removed 
from the theater of the war, and from the regions where 
the relief was to be finally applied. Through the rain and 
mud and cold the group worked on, for no returns, for no 
reward, solely to make their contribution to thoee who were 
suffering. They are the ones who deserve whatever glory 
attaches to the success of the completed service. 



CHAPTER VII 

GETTING THE ENTIRE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS BEHIND THE WORK 

For almost a hundred years Friends in America have 
been a divided people, unable to give a united support to 
any cause. Even the work for the abolition of the slaves 
and for the care of the freedmen failed to bring Friends 
together for a common .task, but the immense tragedies of 
the world war made it impossible for serious men and 
women to busy themselves any longer with insignificant and 
trivial issues. The call for relief, and the opportunity to 
serve which was now opened to Friends made a profound 
appeal to all the members everywhere. Divisions were dis- 
regarded and separations overlooked. Genuine sympathy 
for suffering and the human appeal which touched the heart 
made all Friends feel kin to one another and in fellowship 
with those who needed help. Nothing was said about unit- 
ing. No labored efforts were made to heal breaches. 
Friends spontaneously acted together without stopping to 
think out a plan or scheme of unity. They simply found 
themselves working together in a great cause. 

The work became consequently a corporate undertaking 
and not the affair simply of a committee. Every meeting 
throughout the country had its part in it, and it became 
quite natural to say ''our work." Sewing, knitting and 
food canning occupied almost every Quaker community. 
Each Meeting had its local Service Committee, the secre- 
tary of which received detailed instructions from headquar- 

77 



78 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

ters as to needs and methods, patterns, preferred colors, 
etc. Often the local treasurer purchased wool and cloth out 
of the funds subscribed, and distributed them to members 
for making up. Frequently the local committees held 
weekly sewing bees, when members could have the joy and 
inspiration of corporate work and the pleasant sociability 
of sewing in concert for a common object. At these gather- 
ings letters and news from workers on the field were read, 
and the workers at home so kept closely in touch with the 
conditions at the front. 

• Through these local organizations also the regular canvass 
of every member of the Society of Friends for contributions 
to the work was carried on. Regular subscribers were 
awarded a button to wear with the eight-pointed star, the 
emblem of all the workers abroad and at home. Meetings 
which desired it were also given a Friends Service Flag, 
bearing the same red and black star, to hang in front of or 
inside their Meeting house. 

The story of the condition of the refugees was simply, 
quietly, and yet impressively told to the groups of Friends. 
Everybody who could sew or knit felt a call to produce 
garments. The sudden return to primitive pioneer activi- 
ties was most striking. Our grandmothers and great- 
grandmothers carried knitting everywhere with them and 
acquired the art of knitting 'Without observation," that is, 
by subconscious movement of muscles, and this achievement 
was made once more by multitudes of busy wives and 
mothers and by young girls, sometimes even by dignified 
men. The result in the creation of garments was most 
gratifying. Only those who had the privilege of seeing the 
distribution of these garments, and of sharing in the joy of 
the recipients of them can ever fully know the far-reaching 
effects of this local work of relief. Some of the stories from 



THE SOCIETY BEHIND THE WORK 79 

the field of the reception of the articles made by American 
women Friends give quaint and touching side-Ughts on the 
French peasant character and on the destitution caused 
by the war. Frances C. Ferris, writing from Charmont 
says: 

'*I want to tell you to whom your quilts went. Among 
the old refugee women here at Charmont are two whose 

stories are particularly interesting : Madame P 's home 

was at Verdun, just outside the ancient Porte Chause that 
one sees on the little Verdun medals. In the first great 
German advance, her three daughters-in-law fled panic- 
stricken with their families, leaving Madame P ill in 

bed. There she continued to live for the next year and a 
half, quite alone. How she managed it is impossible to im- 
agine, as she is paralyzed all down her right side, and a tre- 
mendously heavy woman beside. She cooked her frugal 
meals and swept her little room with one hand, but for eight- 
een months she never undressed. The soldiers quartered in 
the city were very kind-hearted, she said, and used to bring 
her water, but ''they didn't reckon to play lady's maid." 
Then, at the second Verdun attack, when the Germans were 
shelling the city from only four miles away, as she cowered 
in her little cottage, the Cure came to her door in the snow. 
'^Tiens, ma grandmere, vous restez tou jours id. Mais il 
faut partir. Le Boche vient demain." And so that night 
she was hoisted into a train of wounded and dying soldiers 
and shipped to Bar-le-Duc. There she stayed at the Hos- 
pice until it, too, was bombed by the Boches and evacuated. 
Her next refuge was a convent in the Haute Mame, where, 
according to her lurid tale, the Schonberg-Cotta family 
type of treatment prevailed in its highest form. The poor 
emigrees evidently were most unkindly treated, and Ma- 
dame P spent quite the wretchedest year of all before 



80 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the ''Amis" came, as she expresses it, ''me delivrer du joug 
de ces ogresses/^ 

The other grandmere^s story is short and sad, the "simple 
annals of the poor." She had one only darling grandson, 
with whom she lived in their little cottage near Revigny. 
He cherished and cared for her after her long life of 
hardship and abuse. She worked their little garden, raised 
some chickens among which, the pride and joy of the grand- 
mere 's heart, was a beautiful cock with a golden tail. Then 
suddenly Revigny became the battlefield of the Mame, the 
little cottage was burned, the grandson taken prisoner and 
killed, the grandmere left desolate at seventy-eight. But 
the greatest pathos of her story is in the description of how 
the soldiers killed her beau coque with the bright tail- 
feathers. "Oui, ma fille, they wrung his neck, the coquins, 
before my very eyes, and then they sat and ate him at my 
own table, my beautiful cock. ' * 

' * These French peasants cling to their little possessions — 
the things that no matter how mean and poor, are their 
very own, in a way that we cannot understand. It some- 
times seems as though loss of family and children were as 
nothing to them compared to the loss of property. It is 
the substance of things hoped for. That is, their property 
is the thing they can transmit, the visible bond that links 
one generation to the next and makes the family the insti- 
tution that it is in France. 

"And so you can imagine what those quilts were to those 
two old dears. To own anything is a joy such as they had 
not expected ever again to experience. But don 't think for 
one moment that they went on their beds. Nothing so 
reckless. They are preserved for posterity. Meantime we 
provide blankets to warm their old bones, but let me assure 
you that it is you that have warmed their hearts." 



THE SOCIETY BEHIND THE WORK 81 

An average of about 50 packages and 3,200 garments per 
week were sent through the central store-room of the 
Friends Service Committee to France for distribution. 
As early as July 15th, 1918, a total of 80,718 garments had 
been sent abroad. All these shipments were made free of 
charge through the American Red Cross Shipping Service. 
The congestion of shipping would have made it utterly im- 
possible for us to have got this immense quantity of freight 
across the ocean if we had not had the assistance of this 
great relief organization. They gave us unusual advantages 
and even in the most difficult periods of ocean service our 
boxes filled with garments continued to go forward on their 
mission of love. The Friends of Race Street Meeting in 
Philadelphia gave us one of the large meeting-rooms of 
their ancient meeting-house as headquarters for storing and 
repacking the garments. It was always a busy place and 
presented a thrilling sight. Mary H. Whitson had the im- 
mediate oversight of the sorting and packing of garments, 
and she has done a piece of work which deserves a promi- 
nent place in the new ' ' Sartor Resartus, ' ' or clothes philoso- 
phy, if ever a new Carlyle writes the story of it. 

Very extensive work, cutting cloth into garments, was 
carried on in the Arch Street Meeting House in Philadel- 
phia, in which work Albert L. Baily, Jr., rendered great serv- 
ice. By excellent foresight large quantities of cloth were 
purchased before the advance of price made cloth a luxury. 

In addition to the clothing made by women workers, 
about thirty thousand dollars' worth of candy, ready-made 
garments, blankets, condensed milk, and drugs had been 
up to that date purchased and sent abroad. 

The central office of the Five Years' Meeting did a large 
amount of efficient work toward organizing the subordinate 
meetings under its care, even before the Five Years' Meet- 



82 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

mg was held in October 1917. By the action of that meet- 
ing, which showed much enthusiasm for the French mission, 
the work of the Servdce Committee was heartily endorsed, 
and each yearly meeting under the Five Years ' Meeting was 
requested to appoint a yearly meeting's service committee 
to cooperate with the central committee in Philadelphia 
and to assist in perfecting organizations in all the local 
meetings of the entire body. Similar action was, at a later 
time, taken also by the Arch Street and Race Street yearly 
meetings of Philadelphia. 

The Service Committee, in its developed form, consisted' 
of the following members: William C. Biddle, T. Janney 
Brown, Henry J. Cadbury, Arabella Carter, Rebecca Car- 
ter, John R. Cary, William W. Cocks, Henry W. Comfort, 
William W. Comfort, Charles Evans, Harold Evans, Wil- 
liam B. Harvey, L. Clarkson Hinshaw, Allen D. Hole, Jesse 
H. Holmes, Hannah Clothier Hull, Arthur C. Jackson, 
J. Edwin Jay, Charles F. Jenkins, Rufus M. Jones, Morris 
E. Leeds, Lucy Biddle Lewis, John R. Maxwell, Annie A. 
Mendenhall, Homer L. Morris, Vincent D. Nicholson, 
Charles J. Rhoads, Lewis L. Rockwell, Albert S. Rogers, 
J, Henry Scattergood, Alfred G. Scattergood, Alva J. 
Smith, Edgar H. Stranahan, Edward F. Stratton, Willard 
E. Swift, Anne G. Walton, J. Barnard Walton, J. Harold 
Watson, L. Hollingsworth Wood, Walter C. Woodward, 
Florence P. Yarnall, Stanley R. Yamall. Throughout 
almost the whole period we kept a stream of lecturers going 
into the various Quaker communities, telling the story of 
the work abroad and keeping the people at home in touch 
with what was happening. Whenever a commissioner, or 
worker who could talk well, came home from France he 
was doomed to a season of travel and to the life of an 
itinerant lecturer until the advance and progress of the 



THE SOCIETY BEHIND THE WORK 83 

work made his story out of date. Morris Leeds came first ; 
then Henry Scattergood arrived, who proved himself to 
be a much enduring traveller and a capital lecturer. The 
officers of the committee, even before they had been on the 
field, were frequently called upon to describe the work 
and to set forth its aims, so that they had to be ready at 
any moment's notice to go out on talking trips. Isaac 
Sharpless, President W. W. Comfort of Haverford and Lucy 
Biddle Lewis also made a large contribution of time and 
effort toward this important work of propaganda. 

As time went on the women's committee which had been 
appointed by the Service Committee at an early period be- 
came an important feature. It was composed of a group of 
devoted, efficient women, with Lucy Biddle Lewis of Lans- 
downe, Pennsylvania, as chairman. They met frequently 
and worked individually in the interim between meetings. 
They selected and equipped the women workers who were 
sent to France. They maintained an oversight over the 
sewing, knitting and cutting work as well as over the 
packing of the garments for shipping. They were in 
numerous ways a constant source of contribution to the 
development of the work. 

The periodicals of the Society of Friends— T/ie Friend, 
The American Friend, and The Friends Intelligencer- 
were well nigh indispensable to our work. They gave 
large space to it every week. They reported plans, an- 
nounced each new move, issued calls for volunteers, stirred 
up interest, interpreted our ideals, and kept the member- 
ship informed about the entire service. They printed 
many letters from the workers, published details of the 
work, and carried into a multitude of homes the story of 
reconstruction. Any one who turns back to earlier files 
of these same papers will be interested to see the change of 



84 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

perspective and to observe how action and service have 
usurped the place once occupied by problems of theology. 
The public press of the country, too, has shown a warm 
interest in the relief work of Friends and has been ready 
at all times to give it support and commendation. Local 
papers have printed many letters from the workers who 
came from the respective communities where the papers 
circulated, and this publicity has been of distinct value 
to the work. Most of the popular magazines of the country 
have contained articles, often profusely illustrated, telling 
in interesting and attractive narrative the story of the 
work, and Sunday editions of the great daily newspapers 
have given much appreciated publicity. Publicity has not 
been sought for its own sake, it has been welcomed only 
as a means to a larger end — the real advancement of the 
service itself. It is a peculiar cause for thanksgiving that 
not only within the Society of Friends but in the accounts 
given from outside the membership as well, the one aim of 
unselfish service has been clearly kept in view. 

One of the most remarkable features of the whole under- 
taking was the splendid financial support which it received 
from all Friends, from the Mennonites and from many other 
interested people. As the work grew and expanded the 
funds for it were always available. It caught the imagin- 
ation of our people, it won their faith and confidence 
and they supported it loyally and generously. During 
the period under review in these chapters more than two 
million dollars have passed through our hands and have 
gone into the work of relief, and we expect to spend even 
more than that amount in feeding the mal-nourished Ger- 
man children, a work now just in its initial stage. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 

Ever since George Fox told the commissioners of the 
English Commonwealth that he lived in virtue of that life 
and power which takes away the occasion for all war, and 
then, because of his refusal to fight, went into a "dungeon 
amongst rogues and felons," the Society of Friends has 
borne its testimony to a way of life so incompatible with 
the methods of war, that its members who clearly and 
positively accept the former way have found it impossible 
to adopt the latter methods. Every time England or 
America has been engaged in an extensive war the Friends 
in these countries have found their principles put to a 
searching test and have had to decide the issue within 
the inner chamber of their souls. The individual decisions 
have, of course, not been uniform. Like those knights of 
Arthur's court who went to seek the Holy Grail, Friends 
have "seen what they have seen," some holding unswerv- 
ingly to the ideal vision and some adopting the methods of 
the hour. But throughout the years the corporate body, 
in its official utterances and messages has consistently 
taken the ground that Christianity, as Friends hold and 
interpret it, is a type of religion utterly incompatible with 
war. Every Friend consequently realized, as the date of 
mobilization of the drafted men drew on, that a great 
testing of the faith was at hand. How would the drafted 
Friends meet the issue when their day came ? 

85 



86 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

The Society of Friends has always had such an exalted 
estimate of the sacredness of individual conscience, and such 
faith in the autonomy of the soul, that it refrains from any 
policy of issuing directions to its members on questions of 
moral decision. It furnishes as a body what light it can 
give on great spiritual principles, but it leaves the tiller 
in the hands of each individual Friend to steer his own 
course in moral issues and to settle his own destiny. The 
Service Committee wrote a letter to young Friends which 
contained the following passages: 

"We can only advise you to decide your own course before 
the high tribunal of your own conscience. This is the tribunal 
which the Government has recognized in its Law and in the affi- 
davit forms of its Regulations, and obedience to the mandates of 
conscience is thus within the law as enacted and interpreted. 
You are peculiarly the standard bearers of the Society of Friends 
in this time of its greatest crisis during our generation. We hope 
that you are so deeply grounded in Christian principles as held by 
the Society of Friends that your conscience will lead you to act 
consistently with these principles. Just in proportion as this 
shall be the case, will those principles command respect and gain 
influence. Only as our young men follow the historic ideals of 
Friends, will our long-standing testimony be more than a mean- 
ingless mass of words. Only in this way will we secure consid- 
eration for our convictions. The War Department will also cer- 
tainly judge of our principles by the action of the majority of 
our members. It is thus of supreme importance that those of 
our members who have made affidavits for discharge on the ground 
of being prevented by conscience from ^participation in war in 
any form' seek very clear guidance in acting consistently with 
their affidavits." 

The Service Committee at the same time endeavored to 
secure the privilege from the War Department for members 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 87 

of the Society of Friends to go to the mobilization camps at 
their own expense and in their own way without joining 
the mobilizing squads which were going as a body on the 
trains. This request was not granted. As chairman of 
the committee, I received from Dr. F. P. Keppel, at this 
period private secretary to the Secretary of War, a letter 
dealing with this point, an extract from which is of interest. 
It was as follows : 

"War Department 
"Washington 

September 10, 1917. 
"Dear Professor Jones: 

"Referring to your telegram of the first, I have just received 
from the Provost Marshal General word to the effect that the pro- 
cedure that requires persons holding certificates of exemption 
from noncombatant service to report to mobilization camps is 
one that has been adopted for the convenience of the Govern- 
ment. To depart from this procedure would cause great confu- 
sion and would accomplish no useful purpose. The Selective 
Service Law exempts adherents to certain creeds from com- 
batant service, but it does not exempt them from military serv- 
ice. On the contrary, the bill provides for a selective draft to 
maintain the organizations of the Regular Army, to complete 
and maintain the organizations of the National Guard, and to 
organize and maintain the National Army. It is a bill to in- 
crease temporarily the miUtary establishment of the United States 
and, after providing for the draft of persons adhering to these 
creeds, it specifically requires that no person exempted on ac- 
count of their religious belief shall be exempt from service in 
any capacity that the President shall declare to be noncombatant. 
This provision of the law will be scrupulously executed. The 
President has so far declared service in the Medical Depart- 
ment of the Army to be noncombatant. He has not, up to this 
date, declared service in the American Friends Reconstruction 



88 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Unit to be such military, noncombatant service as to justify the 
assignment sought." 

Dr. Keppel went on to quote the hope expressed to him 
by Provost Marshal General Crowder that Friends would 
not insist on their objection to travelling on trains with 
other selected men as the point of objection seemed to him 
'*a very little one/' and urging that Friends "withdraw 
their objection and place themselves in an attitude of 
cooperation with the efforts of those charged with the 
execution of the law.'' The ruling was, however, made 
to us that the act of going to camp should not be considered 
as an act of obedience to a military order, since this latter 
stage would begin only after the men were duly registered 
in camp. "With this understanding most young Friends 
who were in the first draft went to the mobilization camps 
on the day appointed — September 18th, 1917. A very few 
declined to go and remained at their homes until they were 
visited at a later time by officers and taken to the camp, 
where they were treated in practically the same way as 
were those who had gone voluntarily. 

The position of a man who goes against the current of 
popular opinion is always difficult and beset with pitfalls, 
not only outward and objective but also inward and sub- 
jective. First he must be clear-headed to see exactly 
where and how he differs from his fellows, and to lay his 
finger on the perceived fallacy in their position which causes 
him to maintain his own. And secondly he must be sweet- 
spirited to bear in mind, under all provocation, how ex- 
tremely trying his apparent pig-headed self-assurance must 
be to all his disagreeing brethren, secure as they are in the 
backing of age, public opinion and tradition. 

Never can the trial be more severe, both of the dissenting 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 89 

individual and of the majority convinced of righteousness, 
than when the dissenter is one v^ho persists in maintaining 
his previous innocuous peace ideas in time of war, and under 
the august operation of a military service act. It only 
adds to the public irritation that a few months previously 
many of them w^ere inclined to adopt his ideas as becoming 
and progressive in an enlightened age. How dare this 
upstart be more consistent than themselves? How dare 
he weigh so lightly the arguments that have been good 
enough for them ? It is of all things essential that the bold 
dissenter be almost superhumanly consistent, tolerant, 
gentle, courteous, humorous, wise, equal to all occasions 
and surprises, or with joy and relief otherwise his suc- 
cessful persecutors will dub him hypocrite, and all his 
effort will have gone for nought. 

Quite naturally when the draft law began calling young 
Friends into camp, their lines of action were various, and 
sometimes uncertain. To many of the boys from the 
farms, unaccustomed to hard thinking or to expressing their 
thoughts, their conscientious objection to war was more a 
deep-rooted instinct than a reasoned faith or opinion. 
They were sure nothing, not even the fear of death, should 
make them fight; but beyond that they were sometimes 
hazy and uncertain. And many with better opportunities 
and less excuse than they, were hazy and uncertain too 
in the bewilderment of the time. "Where to draw the line, 
was the standard question. ''How far can one go without 
compromising conscience?" Some boys refused to drill, 
others consented to drill but refused to carry arms; but 
the really fundamental differences which divided ''the con- 
scientious objectors" into well-defined classes were that some 
were satisfied if they themselves were personally free from 
the responsibility of killing, while others were objectors 



90 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

to the whole system of war, and were not content to be even 
the hindmost parts of the military machine. This last 
class did not ask ''How far can we go without compromis- 
ing our conscience?" Their conscience was not merely a 
mystically-conceived inward voice capable of such quibbles 
as to allow them to be part of an army but not to do 
any of the major deeds which an army is for. Their con- 
science was closely linked with common sense and reason, 
and with certain definite ideas as to what kind of action 
makes for progress and perfection of life and what does not. 
Their religion was not against and in spite of common 
sense, but its strongest support. They desired a world of 
peace and righteousness, and their logical conclusion was 
that they therefore had to live peace and righteousness. 

To them the thing inadequately and unfortunately 
called "a peace testimony" was not something that merely 
came into being in time of war, but involved a way of 
life governed, regardless of times and seasons, by the prin- 
ciples of Christ. And when a war in which their country 
was a participator presented a barrier to this ideal, their 
position was not one of passive protest, but of the active 
presentation of a better way. 

The stories of the dealings with Friends of this class 
and others like-minded, in the military training camps in 
America, can be read in detail in the correspondence of 
the Friends Service Committee and elsewhere. The in- 
cidents related here are told in no spirit of criticism of 
any individuals, but merely to make plain the situation 
when an unyielding and rigid organization like the military 
enters the field to grind such men into the common pattern. 
These incidents also make evident that these men, unusual 
as they were in their action, were not after all far from 
the pattern of their fellows in the deepest convictions 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 91 

of all. Some have tried to prove that the conscientious 
objector was abnormal. It would appear rather that he 
was a normal person who had the courage of his convic- 
tions. The instinctive dislike of the normal civilized man 
to the idea of killing another man, is common knowledge; 
it took all the psychology of military training with its power 
to deaden thought, and even, on the actual field of battle, 
more extreme measures, to bring the ordinary man to the 
requisite pitch of semi-delirious savagery to make a good 
soldier. 

The Friend merely declined to begin to put his highest 
nature under the control of this system. War ought not 
to happen. If individual men refused to take part in it, 
it could not happen. He therefore stopped right there. 

That he was capable of courage, of self-sacrifice, of en- 
durance of hardship, he proved both in going through the 
mill in the camps, and subsequently in the reconstruction 
work in France to which a wise government finally allowed 
him to devote his energy. 

The case of S. W. S., Camp Cody, is one that affords 
a survey of a good many points of difficulty, some at least 
of which were present in every case of what came to be 
called the absolute CO. — that is, the one to whom the 
matter was broader than just his own personal cleanness of 
hand from the actual killing, and who declined to become 
in any way a part of the military machine. The following 
letter from the boy 's mother is interesting : 

"Within a few days after arriving, after examinations, etc., 
they were taken for uniforms, which he did not feel he should put 
on, and did not. The clothing, which was the blue jumpers they 
use for first uniform, was put on him in a harsh manner, and 
afterward he was subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment. 
After refusing to accept any of the so-called noncombatant or 



92 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

any substitute work he was put under griard, and kept in stock- 
ade about three weeks, his suitcase, money, and even some small 
necessities being kept from him. After the court-martial, in 
which he was acquitted, be was taken back into camp, having en- 
dured much cruelty at one time while in the stockade. Efforts 
were made to have him accept soldier work, and he was again 
taken for the khaki uniform which he could not accept and 
would not put on himself. The corporal (as I understand, under 
the Lieutenant's orders) beating him cruelly and gouging thumbs 
in his eyes, while blood from his nose ran down upon his clothing, 
he occasionally being knocked down during the process. Failing 
in getting him to do it, the corporal put the clothes on him." 

For a time after the gouging it seemed likely that the 
sight of S. W. S.'s eyes would be permanently injured, 
but after a few weeks they largely recovered, and the sight 
began to return to normal. 

^'They tell me," writes S. W. S. to a friend at this time, "that 
I could make trouble for the noncommissioned officers if I would 
report them, but I did not want to do that at all unless it seemed 
necessary. 

"A lieutenant told me Second Day [Monday] that I would sure 
go to Leavenworth for twenty-five years if I did not change. 

"I have been stripped and scrubbed with a broom, put under 
a faucet with my mouth held open, had a rope around my neck 
and pulled up choking tight for a bit, been fisted, slapped, kicked, 
carried a bag of sand and dirt until I could hardly hold it and 
go, have been kept under a shower-bath until pretty chilled." . . . 
"If this information will do no good for others thou may just 
bum this letter and let it go." 

In another letter this temperate-spirited youth writes : 

"I would like to mention two or three things which I think 
might have helped me if I had known to start with. Soon after 
reaching camp I sent my non-combatant certificate to the division 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 93 

commander (having been told by the sergeant that he could not 
see him) also part of the ruling in regard to C. 0/s. Later on I 
wrote him a letter stating my case, what I was willing to do, etc. 
These I sent by mail but never heard from them. An officer told 
me to-day that the commander likely never saw them, and that 
they should have been sent up through the officers. 

"Another place where I think I have missed it was when sent 
to a new company I should have always obtained an interview 
with the companj'^ commander, rather than an inferior officer, 
told him what I felt that I could do or could not do (being very 
sure of what that would be) and then stick right to it. They 
have been very persistent in trying to get me to soldier. I was in 
the stockade nearly three weeks, had a trial and was turned out. 
Am under guard again now for refusing to go to rifle range 
with pack, etc. May be sent to prison +bis trip as a number of 
C. O.'s have been from here." 

To another friend he writes of the same incident : 

"I refused to carry a rifle to the target-field this p. M. also to 
put on the khaki uniform, and received quite a beating. An 
officer put the clothes on me, but I did not go out with the 
gun. I am rather a bad-looking specimen about the face this 
evening. 

"I earnestly desire I may not falter to the weakening of the 
cause. I do not want my parents to know how I have been used 
until the battle is over." 

**What I could or could not do — leing very sure of what 
that would he — /' and ''I earnestly desire I may not falter 
to the weakening of the cause'* — this is the spirit of quiet 
determination, without any self-conscious martyrdom or 
sense of priggishness that inspired these young Quakers 
alike in their religious resistance to the force of military 
authority and in their service of the war-ridden French 
in the reconstruction work. 



94 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

The story of W. R. at Camp Dodge, presents the same 
e;ase from a slightly different angle. Says W. R. : 

"I had a written statement with me when I went to camp but 
did not know just how to present it. I still had it when I reached 
the barracks so I mailed it from there to the Camp Commander 
right away. 

"I do not feel as though it is right for me to do any military 
service. They started out the next morning as if they expected 
me to go along like the rest. When we were taken upstairs the 
officer started to tell us things about the army. He said we must 
take our hats off. I did not feel that it was right to take mine 
off to one man more than another, so I was taken, I think to the 
Company Commander who told me I was wrong and asked 
questions about our Society. I also showed him my noncom- 
batant card, certificate of membership (in the Society of Friends) 
and Secretary Baker's order. Then I was brought to the guard 
house where I am yet. 

"I was treated a little rough yesterday, but last evening a 
camp chaplain, I think he said he was, seeing my lip swollen, 
took me into the Officer of the Guard's room and had a talk with 
me. He talked very reasonable, and seemed to think I ought to 
be handled according to law, but not to be abused. 

"Several of the men have talked to me and said they were sorry 
for me and that I had better change my mind and be a man and 
I would feel better. 

"But I feel like sticking to my convictions. The longer I am 
here the worse war seems to me." 

W. R.'s case soon became aggravated because his con- 
science was against saluting officers. He was the only 
conscientious objector in his group whose conscience was 
quite so stiff on that detail, and he was very naturally a 
marked man by the officers, accused of discourtesy, insub- 
ordination, sullenness, and what not, court-martialed and 
sentenced to three months ' hard labor. To labor under mill- 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 95 

tary orders was to become part of the military machine, 
especially as fatigue duties and extra drills were part of 
the camp method of making even the punishment meted 
out to the men conduce to their intensive military training. 
Therefore W. R. refused to ''labor," and was placed in the 
guard house to work out his sentence in solitary confine- 
ment. This meant being kept under a special guard in 
one corner of the guard house, and not allowed to commu- 
nicate with the others in any way. He ate when the others 
had finished eating, and for part of the time was only 
allowed two meals a day. He got no exercise at all. His 
mail was interfered with, sometimes stopped, and always 
censored. Relatives and friends who came to visit him 
were usually not allowed to see him at all. When his 
father obtained that privilege, it was only to be allowed 
to hold a fifteen minutes' talk with his son from out- 
side the luard house door, while the guard kept W. R. 
inside. 

A Friend who finally got a permit to see the conscien- 
tious objectors who were in the guard house at one time, 
to the number of about fifteen, reported: 

''W. R. showed a beautiful spirit but was very broken, 
and could hardly talk much of the time." 

The efforts of friends outside mitigated somewhat 
towards the end of his imprisonment the rigors of his 
treatment, and he was allowed to walk to and from meals, 
which afforded him a minimum of fresh air and exercise 
and a little change, though he was still not allowed to 
speak to any one. 

As a little sidelight upon the earnest conscientious- 
ness of this young man, and the puzzling problem he pre- 
sented to his superiors, unaccustomed to the scrupulousness 
of a sensitive conscience, it is worthy of remark that on 



96 SERVICE OP LOVE IN WAR TIME 

at least one occasion when he failed to salute an officer 
lie was dragged up and made to stand at attention for 
three hours. He consented to do this because, as he says, 
it was for a punishment and not for respect to a military 
order which seemed to him contrary to Christianity. The 
favorite punishment of shovelling and carrying loads of 
sand and dirt, to wear down the recalcitrant recruit by 
exhaustion, he also consented to, for the same reason. 

These cases are fairly typical of the behavior and treat- 
ment of the out-and-outer, the various penalties including 
stoppage of mail, both incoming and outgoing, deprivation 
of personal possessions, ridicule, bullying, wearying and un- 
ceasing argument, coupled with threats of shooting or im- 
prisonment, attempts of every kind to trip them and "get 
them in bad" (as they expressed it), starvation — one man 
was kept for sixteen consecutive meals on bread and 
water, — and various ways of wearing a man down by 
physical weariness, — prolonged standing, carrying heavy 
weights, staggering up and down earth hills with bur- 
dens, throwing men in garbage wagons, etc., the military 
machine trying every means, physical and mental, to bring 
the objectors to submission. 

Camps in which Quakers (as well as Mennonite and other 
C. O.'s) were present in the course of the draft were: 
Camp Benjamin Harrison, Camp Custer, Camp Cody, 
Camp Devens, Camp Dix, Camp Dodge, Camp DuPont, 
Camp Flagler, Camp Punston, Camp Gordon, Camp Grant, 
Camp Hancock, Camp Porrest, Camp Premont, Camp 
Jackson, Camp Jessup, Camp Kearney, Port Leavenworth, 
Camp Lee, Camp Lewis, Camp Meade, Camp Macarthur, 
Port Mcdowell, Camp Merritt, Camp Mills, Port Ogle- 
thorpe, Camp Pike, Camp Raritan, Camp Sever, Camp 
Shelley, Camp Sherman, Camp Taylor, Port Thomas, 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 97 

Camp Travis, Camp Upton, Camp Wadsworth, Camp 
Williams. 

The Service Committee, seeing the important work that 
would be called for in connection with the Friends in the 
camps, appointed F. Algernon Evans secretary of this 
branch of work. He carried on extensive correspondence 
with the drafted men and gave them a large amount of 
assistance, of the sort that could be rendered from a dis- 
tant center. It seemed necessary also to have some way 
of getting closer to the men who were carrying on their 
lonely struggle, and for this reason Paul J. Furnas was 
appointed field secretary. He visited the camps through- 
out the country and gave the men much personal help and 
refreshment in their hour of testing. 

His method was on arriving at a camp to obtain an in- 
terview with the commanding officer and state his creden- 
tials and ask for any information that the officer himself 
could furnish as to the conduct and treatment of C. O.'s in 
that camp. He would also ask permission to see the 
members of the Society of Friends that might be in the 
camp. These direct, open and above-board methods 
usually resulted in friendly relations being established 
with the commanding officer, especially as Paul Furnas 
asked for any directions as to conduct that the commanding 
officer might desire to give him. 

He was then usually permitted to see the Friends who 
were in camp, and was able to see and hear for himself what 
their difficulties were. After this he would see the com- 
manding officer again and report, and would go over care- 
fully the rulings of Secretary Baker with regard to the 
segregation and treatment of C. O.'s. As a general rule 
these recommendations had escaped the notice of the com- 
manding officer, and he was often grateful for the sugges- 



98 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

tion as to how to deal with a problem that had become 
very tiresome to him. 

Many of the yearly meetings had draft committees to 
look after their men and much local service was rendered 
in the camps by members of these committees. In several 
camps religious meetings were held for the Friends and 
for other C. O.'s who were interested, and for the most 
part the camp officers made the way easy for visits and 
for personal intercourse, though in the later periods of 
camp life the regulations concerning the visits of those 
who were not recognized chaplains became more strict. 

When Friends and other C. O.'s were segregated, they 
were provided with the necessities of life and daily rations 
of raw food, and did their own cooking, looked after their 
quarters, did their own laundry, and in every way were 
as independent of the camp organization as possible. This 
entailed a good deal of extra "roughing it," but was a 
great improvement on any other plan, as the C. O.'s were 
inevitably in the awkward position, though refusing pay, 
of being fed and "housed" at the expense of the govern- 
ment willy nilly, and the segregation into a self-serving com- 
munity diminished their obligation to the minimum. It 
also provided them with much-longed-for occupation. 
Wearisome enough it was to be employed on such compara- 
tively useless labor when the farms were crying out for 
man-power to produce food and France was needing con- 
secrated labor for the comfort of the peasantry and the 
reestablishment of their lives. And the efforts of the Ser- 
vice Committee by no means ceased as they succeeded in 
getting the men segregated in the various camps. 

By an order of the President issued November 8th, 1917, 
a new selective service regulation was put into operation. 
By this order all previous exemptions were revoked. An 



THE KEEPERS OP THE FAITH 99 

extensive questionnaire had to be answered by every man 
of military age and by this new plan any American mem- 
ber of our unit in France might be called home for service 
under the draft. This raised a multitude of new problems. 
To make matters still more difficult the President's long- 
delayed ruling upon what should constitute "non-combat- 
ant service" under the Draft Act was issued March 20th, 
1918, and failed to recognize the Friends' objection to any 
form of service under the military system. 

The President's executive order was as follows: 

I hereby declare that the following miUtary service is non- 
combatant service: 

l.-a. Service in the Medical Corps wherever performed. This 
includes service in the sanitary detachments attached to combat- 
ant units at the front; service in the divisional sanitary trains 
composed of ambulance companies and field hospital companies, 
on the line of communications, at the base in France, and with the 
troops and at hospitals in the United States; also the service of 
supply and repair in the Medical Department. 

b. Any service in the Quartermaster Corps in the United 
States may be treated as noncombatant. Also, in rear of zone 
of operations, service in the following: stevedore companies, 
labor companies, remount depots, veterinary hospitals, supply 
depots, bakery companies, the subsistence service, the bathing 
service, the laundry service, the salvage service, the clothing ren- 
ovation service, the shoe repair service, the transportation repair 
service, and motor-truck companies. 

c. Any engineer service in the United States may be treated 
as noncombatant service. Also, in rear of zone of operations, 
service as follows: railroad building, operation and repair; road 
building and repair; construction of rear line fortifications, aux- 
iliary defenses, etc., construction of docks, wharves, storehouses 
and of such cantonments as may be built by the Corps of Engi- 
neers; topographical work; camouflage; map reproduction; sup- 



100 SEE-VICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

ply depot service; repair service; hydraulic service; and forestry 
service. 

2.-Persons ordered to report for military service under the 
above Act who have (a) been certified by their Local Boards to 
be members of a religious sect or organization as defined in 
section 4 of said act; or (b) who object to participating in war 
because of conscientious scruples but have failed to receive cer- 
tificates as members of a religious sect or organization from their 
Local Board, will be assigned to noncombatant military service 
as defined in paragraph 1 to the extent that such persons are able 
to accept service as aforesaid without violation of the religious 
or other conscientious scruples by them in good faith entertained. 
Upon the promulgation of this order it shall be the duty of each 
Division, Camp, or Post Commander, through a tactful and con- 
siderate officer, to present to all such persons the provisions hereof 
with adequate explanation of the character of noncombatant ser- 
vice herein defined, and upon such explanations to secure accep- 
tances of assignment to the several kinds of noncombatant service 
above enumerated; and whenever any person is assigned to non- 
combatant service by reason of his religious or other conscientious 
scruples, he shall be given a certificate stating the assignment and 
reason therefor, and such certificate shall thereafter be respected 
as preventing the transfer of such persons from such noncombat- 
ant to combatant service by any Division, Camp, Post, or other 
Commander under whom said person may thereafter be called to 
serve, but such certificate shall not prevent the assignment of such 
person to some other form of noncombatant service with his own 
consent. So far as may be found feasible by each Division, 
Camp, or Post Commander, future assignments of such persons 
to noncombatant military service will be restricted to the several 
detachments and units of the Medical Department in the absence 
of a request for assignment to some other branch of noncombatant 
service as defined in paragraph 1 hereof. 

3.-0n the first day of April, and thereafter monthly, each 
Division, Camp, or Post Commander shall report to the Adjutant 
General of the Army, for the information of the Chief of Staff 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 101 

and the Secretary of War, the names of all persons under their 
respective commands who profess religious or other conscientious 
scruples as above described and who have been unwilling to 
accept, by reason of such scruples, assignment to noncombatant 
military service as above defined, and as to each such person so 
reported a brief, comprehensive statement as to the nature of 
the objection to the acceptance of such noncombatant military 
service entertained. The Secretary of War will from time to 
time classify the persons so reported and give further directions 
as to the disposition of them. Pending such directions from the 
Secretary of War, all such persons not accepting assignment to 
noncombatant service shall be segregated as far as practicable 
and placed under the command of a specially qualified officer 
of tact and judgment, who will be instructed to impose no punitive 
hardship of any kind upon them, but not to allow their objections 
to be made the basis of any favor or consideration beyond exemp- 
tion from military service which is not extended to any other sol- 
dier in the service of the United States. 

4.-With a view to maintaining discipline, it is pointed out that 
the discretion of courts-martial, so far as any shall be ordered 
to deal with the cases of persons who fail or refuse to comply 
with lawful orders by reason of alleged religious or other con- 
scientious scruples, should be exercised, if feasible, so as to secure 
uniformity of penalties in the imposition of sentences under 
Articles of War 64 and 65, for the wilful disobedience of a 
lawful order or command. It will be recognized that sentences 
imposed by such courts-martial, when not otherwise described 
by law, shall prescribe confinement in the United States Disciplin- 
ary Barracks or elsewhere as the Secretary of War or the re- 
viewing authority may direct, but not in a penitentiary; but this 
shall not apply to the cases of men who desert either before 
reporting for duty to the military authorities or subsequently 
thereto. 

5.-The Secretary of War will revise the sentences and findings 
of courts-martial heretofore held of persons who come within 
any of the classes herein described, and bring to the attention of 



102 SERVICE OP LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the President for remedy, if any be needed, sentences and judg- 
ments found at variance with provisions hereof. 

WooDROw Wilson. 
The White House, 
20 March, 1918. 

This ruling made the absolutist 0. O.'s position much 
more difficult, while it tended to draw those who did not 
think deeply over the issues into forms of army service. 
The large proportion, however, of the Friends in camps 
remained unmoved by the ruling and stood out as before 
against all complicity with the military system. A few 
more specimen cases will further illustrate the mind of the 
boys and the difficulties which confronted them. 

Here is a little light on Camp Jackson. A man, suc- 
ceeding in getting an uncensored letter through, writes : 

"We are segregated to a certain extent. We occupy about 
nine or ten tents in a row and at the end of our tents is our mess- 
hall, where we cook, eat, and wash mess kits, etc., by ourselves. 
But our row of tents is only about 30 to 35 feet away from a 
row that is occupied by soldiers, only a street between that comes 
to our tent-stake. This street is used by the soldiers, we not being 
allowed on that street. Our tents face the other way, and in 
front of them is a street about 25 feet wide and we are not 
allowed to get off that street only to go to the mess hall and our 
toilet. . . . 

"We are not allowed to buy a paper, and our mail is delayed. 
What comes in is often from seven to fourteen days old. 

"We are guarded as if we were criminals, three soldiers with 
rifles being on guard over us night and day. They work in 
shifts, three at a time. . . . 

"I, can right now touch a boy that was kicked until his legs were 
blue from just below the knee to the ankle, and was taken by the 
collar twice and violently jerked to the floor scrubbing the blood 
out of his face and almost choked to death. His face was bruised 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 103 

until his right eye was completely swelled together. Here lest I 
forget it I want to say that the fellow that abused him went crazy 
and had to be discharged. They say while he was crazy he would 
pray an hour and a half some nights and cry and call for that 
Quaker boy that he wanted to talk to him again. 

"Another fellow had his two upper front teeth knocked out, 
and several have been put in the guard house for several days and 
kept on bread and water." 

A boy in the training detachment of Indianapolis, Ind., 
was set to pull weeds on the camp ground, including poison 
ivy. The boy, very anxious not to be recalcitrant when 
his conscientious stand made him already so unable to obey 
most orders, begged to be allowed to leave the poison ivy 
but was ordered by his guard to pull it. He obeyed, and 
was badly poisoned, but was kept so ceaselessly busy, and 
without a moment of respite or privacy — being constantly 
under guard — ^that he was unable to treat his poisoned 
body and relieve himself. 

At Camp Funston some of the men received very fair 
treatment. J. T. B. refused to put on the uniform or drill, 
and was excused from both. He consented, unofficially, to 
make himself useful by cleaning the officers' tents. 
**This," he remarks, ''gave me a splendid chance to get 
acquainted with the officers, and I had quite a talk with 
the captain one day. I am willing to do this work as I 
would not wish to be idle. And then it dispels the idea 
that we do not wish to do anything." 

Other camps were more severe. L. E. M. of Waynes- 
ville, Ohio, was tried at Camp Greenleaf for refusing 
to wear uniform or do fatigue duty, and sentenced to ten 
years. 

U. DeR. was tried at Fort Riley for refusing any kind of 
noncombatant service under military control, and the court- 



104 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

martial sentenced him to imprisonment for life, afterwards 
commuted by General Wood to twenty-five years. 

G. L. was sentenced for thirty years from Camp Dodge. 
He was taken to Fort Leavenworth on December 4th. 
He refused to work at the prison, and was placed in soli- 
tary confinement in the ''hole" until December 26th. For 
the first two weeks he was given nothing but bread and 
water to eat. For the first seven days he was chained to the 
door of his cell for nine hours a day. His arms were thrust 
through the bars, and handcuffed on the outside. His bed 
at first consisted of three boards and three blankets. He 
was allowed to write only one letter every two weeks. 

It is evident by these few examples that the conditions 
under which the CO. found himself differed very greatly 
according to the character of the men in authority in the 
camps, and with the personal tact and power of self-ex- 
pression of the C. 0. 

An inarticulate man, slow of speech and thought, was 
set down as sullen by impatient officers. A man who was 
too ready to talk was recalcitrant and defiant. 

At Camp Funston the C. 0. was able to satisfy his con- 
science and keep on good terms with the powers that were 
by doing odd cleaning jobs without uniform. 

At Camp Fort Lee the C. O. asked in vain for any work 
of a non-military nature that would not necessitate putting 
on the uniform. 

The life of inaction, of loafing in segregated quarters or 
in the guard house, that was imposed on the C. 0. in 
many camps was the most testing that could be imposed 
on healthy, active young men. Many who found their 
strength not enough for the trial, and were driven into 
compromise, were broken by the idleness. They could 
not stand it. 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 105 

But the large majority who began by an uncompro- 
mising, decided line, were strengthened to maintain it to 
the end. No doubt the problem would have been simpli- 
fied, both for the C. 0. and the military, if all C. O.s had 
made a uniform stand, but the corollary of freedom of 
conscience is a final farewell to uniformity. Every man fol- 
lowed the light that he saw, and one's perception of 
light is limited by one's clearness of vision. A luminous 
and logical conscience is not the growth of a day but of 
a lifetime. Previous habits of thought, previous knowledge 
of God, former integrity or carelessness of life entered into 
each man 's conception of his duty in the crisis. 

Some of the men who went to camp accepted the uniform, 
and presently accepted some form of noncombatant service. 
In some cases they did this more or less deliberately. It 
was, of course, the line of least resistance. 

Others accepted it through muddled thinking, promoted 
by false or misleading information on the part of the local 
authorities. As an example of this, one may quote from a 
letter of C. H. one of the staunch C. O.'s at Camp Funston. 

"6, 29, 18. This evening several new objectors have come into 
camp here, just from the receiving station. This is something 
new, as most of us put in from two weeks to eight months before 
being segregated. I am told that these men have all signed up 
for noncombatant military service. In fact the pressure to do 
so is being increased. One fellow told me the officers assured him 
that all the C. O.'s had done so. . . . While I was writing the 
above H. H. walked in. He is one of the new arrivals, and said 
he signed an acceptance of base hospital work. The officers per- 
suaded him that he could change his decision in this matter later 
if he wished. I feel sure he has been duped," 

Of those who, on coming to camps not decided exactly 
where to draw the line, were persuaded into acceptance of 



106 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

apparently innocuous soldiering, the majority took one or 
other of the following lines of submission: Kitchen work, 
hospital work — or other work in the Army Ambulance 
Corps, — work in the Quartermaster Corps, the Engineer 
Corps, or other similar work which would not, except in 
emergency, involve actual fighting. Some accepted the 
uniform right away, others would at first only wear part — 
one man drew the line at putting on the cap — most drilled, 
but some refused to carry weapons. 

Some remained satisfied with their position, but others 
were uneasy in their consciences, and later tried to take up 
a more uncompromising stand. The difficulty which beset 
them may be imagined. It was practically impossible for 
them to convince any authorities of their sincerity. The 
military authorities became great sticklers for unswerving 
erectness of conscience, and were swift to point out to an 
unfortunate waverer the inconsistencies in his conduct, 
even when these had been partly due to his too great reli- 
ance upon their assurances. 

For instance, one man writes : * ' I presented a card from 
the local board to the captain, he stated that the Friends 
that were drafted now were not any more than any one else, 
that the President was sending them to prison. ' ' 

And many simple-minded, honest lads, unaccustomed to 
sophistry and subtle dealing, were persuaded into taking 
kitchen and orderly work by being told that it ''sorter paid 
for their board. ' ' Nevertheless their having accepted such 
work made it harder for them later to establish their 
position as sincere conscientious objectors. 

The difficulties occasioned by taking a false step are 
illustrated by the following experiences of two men in 
Camp Flagler. 

M. and C. two Quaker boys drafted to Fort Flagler in 



THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH 107 

the State of Washington refused to take the military oath 
or to put on the uniform, and were at once put in the guard 
house upon their arrival in camp. A Friend who investi- 
gated the case writes: 

' 'Form 174 was ignored. I had several talks with officers, 
then we were brought before the major and told that Presi- 
dent Wilson had ordered C. 0. 's to do odd jobs in camps — 
in fact everything but bear arms. They were told if they 
would take the oath all would be well. That this was their 
last chance. If they did not obey now they would be 
court-martialed. The boys refused to take the oath, and 
were returned to the guard house. . . . Money confis- 
cated. C. threatened with seven years' confinement. The 
only charges are refusal to act contrary to Form 174 which 
each has. ..." 

Another Friend went to see the boys and persuaded them 
to take the affirmation which the officers insisted upon. 
This they finally did under his influence, but against their 
own judgment. They were promised that this action would 
in no way prejudice their case when the president gave his 
ruling. 

Shortly, however, afterwards their refusal to drill or to 
put on the uniform caused C. and M. to be put into the 
guard house, this time they were separated and were not al- 
lowed to communicate with any one. They were ordered to 
do various military fatigue duties, and the uniform put on 
M. by force. The latter, who was a large fellow, fully six 
feet tall, was confined in a cell six feet by four. Their mail 
was censored, delayed, and sometimes suppressed. Says 
M. in a letter which he succeeded in getting out at this 
time: 

''R. C. and I are silent room orderlies, sweep out, etc., 
and go out one at a time for half -hour walks in the eve- 



108 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

ning. . . . We eat in the guard house now; R. C. at one 
end of the table, and I at the other. ..." 

The Friends Service Committee took up these cases 
with the authorities at Washington, and the officers at 
Camp Flagler next raised doubts as to whether M. and C. 
were really members of the Society of Friends. Affidavits 
proving their membership and good standing in the 
Society were at once obtained and also their certificates 
of membership. But there were many delays. The reason 
for the doubt cast upon their membership by the district 
commander was that he stated that he did not understand 
how these men, if they were Quakers, could have been 
inducted into the military service, which local Friends 
interpreted as referring to their having taken the oath i.e. 
by affirmation. 

M.'s court-martial was now imminent, the charges being 
that he had disobeyed orders, was guilty of mutiny, and 
of not wearing uniform. A ten years ' sentence was threat- 
ened. M.'s health was affected by the prolonged confine- 
ment, and his throat gave him much trouble. 

They were kept in solitary confinement for three months, 
but finally through much effort on the part of Paul Furnas, 
under the system of furlough, to be described in the next 
chapter, they were turned over to our committee and were 
sent to France. 



CHAPTER IX 

PURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 

The men whose story has been all too briefly told in the 
previous chapter, by their faith and their readiness to 
suffer for it, were in the true Quaker ''apostolic succes- 
sion/' They took their stand on a principle which seemed 
to them absolutely true and sound, and they resolved to 
hold that truth unwaveringly whatever the cost might be. 
It was impossible for any one to call them ' ' cowards ' ' since 
their bearing and spirit ''bewrayed" them as brave and 
unafraid, and belonging in the Galilean fellowship. 

The War Department was honestly disposed to have 
them properly treated while in camp and also desirous of 
finding some just solution of their anomalous problem. 
There were, however, two grave difficulties which made it 
extremely hard to hit upon a satisfactory solution. One 
difficulty was that the officials who had the matter im- 
mediately in hand did not comprehend the meaning of 
conscience. They were inclined to consider the state of 
mind of the C. 0. to be one either of stubbornness or of 
stupidity, or of abnormality, or, more likely, one of sham- 
ming. Even men who were kindly disposed, as were a 
great number of those who were confronted with the prob- 
lem, did not seem able to understand the moral attitude 
of the men. "When the course of the nation had been once 
settled and we had officially decided to go to war, to these 
public officials that act closed the debate. They could 

109 



110 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

not see how an individual could venture to set up his own 
tribunal and go contrary to the established line of march 
of the world to which he belonged. It was hard to be fair 
to such a freaky specimen as the C. 0. seemed to be, and 
patient with him. 

But the still graver difficulty which confronted the War 
Department was the danger of multiplying the group of 
C. O.'s by being too lenient with the first ones with whom 
they had to deal. The Department assumed that the mo- 
ment the rumor got abroad that C. O.'s were to have an 
easy path and that the claim of conscience offered a way 
to escape from military service there would be ''legions" 
of these claimants. This prudential attitude kept the De- 
partment from formulating any final decision. As soon as 
the second draft was arranged for it became evident that 
the C. O.'s in the first draft could expect no relief and no 
decision in their cases. They must be used, if possible, 
to scare off other persons who might be inclined to imitate 
them. There was, therefore, no chance for us to secure 
any satisfactory disposal of these early cases until the 
danger of their influence upon other drafted men had 
passed by,,-^ 

While, therefore, we could not succeed during the winter 
of 1917-18 in getting any relief for the Friends who were 
confined in the barracks, we were busily engaged in work- 
ing out a plan for keeping the members of our unit, who 
were already in France, from being called home for the 
second draft. The War Department which was always in 
sympathy with our work of relief and reconstruction 
abroad, saw how futile it would be to break up the work 
these men were doing, to bring them back to America for 
the purpose of the draft, and to send them to the camps 
to swell the ranks of the C. O.'s whom they didn't know 



FURLOUGHED FOE RECONSTRUCTION 111 

how to dispose of. It was not easy, however, to hit upon 
a plan that would work and would not at the same time 
be inconsistent with the legal provisions of the draft and 
the definite rulings of the Provost Marshal. We had 
numerous conferences on these points with the officials of 
the Department. Everything was done that could fairly 
be done to extend the time of the Friends overseas, and a 
most favorable temporary scheme was arranged through 
the Provost Marshal's office by which each member of the 
Reconstruction Unit had his ' ' call ' ' delayed, while the whole 
problem of the disposal of ''conscientious objectors" was 
awaiting solution. This temporary delay enabled us to 
keep the entire group of workers in France throughout the 
winter, though we never knew when the plan which was 
only a makeshift might be suddenly upset. We were, of 
course, all the time working for a permanent solution of the 
situation, a solution of a sort that would not only insure 
the stability of the men abroad but that would also release 
the men in camps for a similar service. Many tentative 
plans were suggested but obviously no plan could be finally 
adopted by the Department until it satisfied the judgment 
of a great variety of persons concerned, and was felt to be 
efficient and ' ' safe ' ' both from a political point of view and 
especially from the perspective of the newspapers. One 
scheme which met with considerable favor was a plan to 
turn over the conscientious objectors, who were believed to 
be sincere, to a joint commission composed of members of 
the Society of Friends, the Mennonites and the Brethren 
(Dunkards). The three religious societies were asked by 
the Department to choose and organize such a commission 
and have it ready to act. The plan as tentatively arranged 
was drawn up as follows : 

"The commission shall be composed of at least nine men 



112 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

of broad and understanding sympathies to be named by the 
religious organizations whose principles are opposed to 
war, subject to the approval of the Secretary of War, as 
follows: three from the Society of Friends, three from the 
Mennonites, and three from the Church of the Brethren, all 
of whom shall give, without compensation from the Gov- 
ernment, faithful attention to the work which naturally 
comes before the commission. 

'^ Drafted men belonging to the above religious denom- 
inations, and others conscientiously opposed to military 
service who may be recommended by the Secretary of War 
and approved by the commission, on being referred by the 
War Department to said commission, shall be by it organ- 
ized and employed in one or other of the civil pursuits 
entirely removed from military control, and shall receive 
no pay from the War Department for such service : 

' ' First. — Agriculture. 

''Second. — Civil relief and reconstruction work abroad. 

' ' Third. — Forestry or other reclamation work. 

"Fourth. — In general civilian occupations recommended 
by the Commission and approved by the War Department. 

*'It is understood that said drafted men shall be kept 
employed in some useful pursuit as above, and that monthly 
reports from said drafted men shall be sent to the com- 
mission stating briefly the nature of the work in which 
they are engaged, compensation therefor, health of the in- 
dividual, and other such matters as may seem of interest; 
a summary of these reports to be forwarded to the War 
Department at such times as it may direct." 

The following persons were named by the respective de- 
nominations to constitute the commission : 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 113 

For the Friends : 

Rufus M. Jones, Haverford, Pa., who was made chair- 
man of the commission 

William B. Harvey, Philadelphia, Pa. 

J. Lawrence Lippincott, Riverton, N. J. 
For the Mennonites : 

J. S. Hartveller, Scottdale, Pa. 

Silas M. Grubb, Philadelphia, Pa. 

Peter N. Nissley, Mount Joy, Pa. 
For the Brethren: 

W. J. Swigart, Huntingdon, Pa. 

C. B. Bonsack, New Windsor, Md. 

I. W. Taylor, Neffsville, Pa. 

After much consideration, consultation and correspond- 
ence it did not seem best to put this plan into operation. 
It was sure to be open to criticism on the part of those 
who wanted severe measures used toward these men, and 
persons of such attitude could hardly approve of turning 
the C. 0. 's over to the tender mercies of their own friends 
and people ! The next plan, the one which was finally 
adopted, was a furlough system. In its earliest form and 
stage the furlough-plan was put into operation to use in 
agricultural work the men who could be spared from the 
camps. This gave the suggestion for the plan to make 
disposition of conscientious objectors. The Act of Congress 
under which furloughs were arranged passed the Senate 
February 5th, 1918 as follows ; 

"AN ACT 
To authorize the Secretary of War to grant furloughs without 
pay and allowances to enlisted men of the Army of the United 
States. 
"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 



114 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the United States of America in Congress assembled, That when- 
ever during the continuance of the present war in the opinion of 
the Secretary of War the interests of the service or the national 
security and defense render it necessary or desirable, The Sec- 
retary of War be, and he hereby is, authorized to grant furloughs 
to enlisted men of the Army of the United States with or without 
pay and allowances or with partial pay and allowances, and, for 
such periods as he may designate, to permit said enlisted men to 
engage in civil occupations and pursuits." 

This amendment was added in the House: ** Provided 
that such furloughs shall be granted only upon the vol- 
untary application of such enlisted men under regulations 
to be prescribed by the Secretary of War." This change 
was accepted by the Senate March 9th and the Act imme- 
diately received the President's signature. The War De- 
partment in its interpretation and ruling upon the scope 
of the furlough system decided that men who were found 
to be sincere conscientious objectors to war might be 
furloughed either for agriculture in this country or for 
reconstruction work in France under the American Friends 
Service Committee, the work of our committee being speci- 
fically named in the ruling. A board of inquiry of three 
persons — in the first instance two civilians and an army 
officer, at a later period all three being civilians — ^was 
appointed by the Department to visit the camps, interview 
the C. O.'s and decide upon the ''sincerity" of their pro- 
fession.^ The board was composed of serious, high-minded, 
kindly disposed men, who honestly endeavored to do the 
impossible, i.e. to decide after a brief interview with the 
men, who among them was sincere and who was insincere. 

1 It was originally planned to segregate all the C. O.'s at Fort 
Leavenworth and to have the Board of Inquiry do its work there. 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 115 

There were further long delays before it could be de- 
cided who should have the immediate care of the men 
recommended for furlough by this board. At first the 
Department was in favor of using the Joint Commission 
mentioned above, and later of having a single commis- 
sioner who should be directly responsible for the men, our 
commission being only advisory. While attending New 
England Yearly Meeting in June, 1918, I received the fol- 
lowing telegram from Secretary Keppel of the War De- 
partment : ' ' The Board of Inquiry seems to favor having a 
single commissioner responsible for furlough of conscien- 
tious objectors your committee [meaning the Joint Com- 
mission] acting in an advisory capacity to such commis- 
sioner, suggesting assignments of individual men, looking 
up references of employers, etc., but leaving routine 
operation, such as checking of reports, etc., to commis- 
sioner whom the Department would hold responsible for 
the smooth working of the system. It is suggested that a 
competent adjutant sympathetic with the whole question 
be detailed for this purpose. Do you think that this ar- 
rangement if approved by the Secretary of War would be 
satisfactory to you and your associates?'^ 

I replied that the general plan would be satisfactory, 
but that the entire arrangement would almost certainly 
break down if an adjutant or any military officer were 
selected for the position of commissioner. I pointed out 
that the C. O.'s could not change their attitude about 
serving under the military system and that the success 
of the plan depended on its being civilian throughout 
After much correspondence and personal discussion the 
point was accepted and Professor R. C. McCrea of Colum- 
bia University was appointed commissioner, than whom 



116 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

no more suitable man for this place could have been selected. 
As the men furloughed for reconstruction work in France 
were eventually to be under the care of the Service Com- 
mittee it was rightly felt and decided that this committee 
rather than the Joint Commission should be responsible 
for them and should deal directly with the commissioner, 
or with the officials of the Department, as the case required. 

Practically all the conscientious objectors who were 
given the opportunity of accepting furlough for our service 
abroad felt free to do so, though a tiny few declined to 
accept any way out. Most of the Friends who were seg- 
regated in the camps as C. O.'s had already been accepted 
as members of the Friends Unit and were only waiting 
for the chance to go to France. The way which was offered 
seemed to them as free of moral obstacles or compromises 
as any which could be devised in the midst of a great war, 
and they seized the opportunity to show their readiness for 
service of a type which conformed with their spiritual aims. 

Just as these arrangements were culminating Vincent 
D. Nicholson, our executive secretary, was called in the 
draft and was unable to secure exemption. He had taken 
an extremely able part in the development of every feature 
of the work and he had borne a full share of the burdens 
and responsibilities of every undertaking from the day the 
work was organized to the day he left for camp. His 
mind was keen and brilliant. He was quick to seize upon 
a course of action and highly gifted in the power to dis- 
cover solutions of difficulties. He possessed unusual moral 
and spiritual qualities of life. His motives were pure, 
his eye single, and his heart was right. His life is forever 
built into the work which the Service Committee has done 
and it seemed peculiarly tragic to have him taken from 
his task at the moment when the door was opening for 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 117 

a great extension of the work which he had eminently 
helped to plan and construct.^ 

Wilbur K. Thomas of Boston was at this time giving two 
months of volunteer service in our office — the months of 
July and August, 1918. He had already done splendid 
service on the Service Committee of New England Yearly 
Meeting, particularly in connection with the men segre- 
gated in Camp Devens, at Ayer, Massachusetts. His tem- 
porary work in the office revealed his traits of efficiency, 
and his devotion to the cause had been clear to everybody 
who knew him. From the time he was made executive 
secretary until the present moment he has been a weighty 
factor in the development and direction of every part of 
the wide and complex undertakings. He has revealed 
capacity for organization and an equal talent for matters 
of large scope as for small details. Power to stand hard, 
heavy work and to keep his head clear and his spirit 
sweet is not the least feature among the qualifications with 
which he appears to be gifted. These two executive sec- 
retaries were so vitally connected with every part of the 
work, that one or the other of them is inseparably linked 
into every important undertaking of the committee. 

Vincent Nicholson and I had a very important engage- 
ment in Washington (August 1, 1918) for which I had 
come to the Capital from Maine. On arrival there I found 
a telegram from Vincent saying that he was called to 

1 The wheels moved pitiably slow when the question of his furlough 
came up. Many efforts were made to secure it and to hasten it, but 
his period in camp lasted until the time of the armistice. As soon 
as he was free he applied for service abroad, was accepted, and began 
his activity in France as a humble laborer at hut-building, rapidly 
rising to other tasks where his gifts could come more fully into play ; 
and at a later period of his service he undertook an important mission 
to Vienna and Poland 



118 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

camp and could not join me. Again and again we had 
worked together in Washington on critical problems and 
I felt now somewhat as Paul must have felt alone in Athens. 
I had a great day's work to do and no companion to help 
share the strain of it. It proved a memorable day, how- 
ever, for the decisions that were reached. On my return 
to Philadelphia the executive board was called together. 
It was decided to ask Wilbur K. Thomas to become execu- 
tive secretary, and I was commissioned to secure, if possible, 
his release from his engagements in Boston. A committee 
of Boston Friends' Meeting met my train and we held the 
decisive conference in South Station, surrounded by sol- 
diers going and coming, and by a moving throng that 
wondered what we were debating so eagerly! The result 
was that Wilbur Thomas was secured for the important 
post. He threw himself at once into the work with en- 
thusiasm and with rare ability. One of the earliest of 
his new tasks was the formation of plans for taking care 
of the furloughed men during the interim period before 
they could sail for France. It was decided to take Merion 
Hall, at Haverford College, as a home and headquarters 
for these men while they were waiting. They were given 
opportunities for studying French, for practicing automo- 
bile driving and repair, and for learning to cook and serve 
meals. They also did a large amount of farm work on 
Haverford College and other near-by farms. 

The first group of men from the camps who arrived at 
Merion Hall felt powerfully moved when they found 
themselves at last at the haven of their hopes, and they 
aroused deep emotions in the hearts of those who welcomed 
them. Some of the men who came in from their long train 
journeys sat down on the steps of the hall and wept for 
sheer joy. During the first period of the sojourn at 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 119 

Merion Hall Wilbur Thomas lived with the men and gave 
them much counsel and fellowship. The personnel com- 
mittee, a sub-committee of the Service Committee, had the 
immediate oversight of the furloughed men and of their 
selection and equipment for the field service. This com- 
mittee, whose work now became greatly expanded, was en- 
larged in membership and was reorganized with Morris E. 
Leeds as its chairman. He gave a large amount of time to 
the extensive work under the personnel committee and 
proved here, as he had done in France, a wise and devoted 
leader and counsellor. 

The number of the furloughed men steadily increased 
and the promises of the War Department led us to expect 
that a large part of all the conscientious objectors would 
soon be turned over to us to be provided for. Meantime 
we could only very slowly get the men off for overseas. 
Passports came very tardily, passages were hard to secure, 
and it was not possible to assimilate large groups of men 
at a time into the work in France. It, therefore, became 
necessary for us to work out some better plan for the tem- 
porary management of the men and for using their labor 
while they were in ''demurrage." At this juncture Wil- 
liam B. Harvey, who had kept in close touch with the con- 
scientious objectors and who had been very active in helping 
to solve their problems, discovered a large fruit-farm at 
Rosedale, near Kennett Square, admirably adapted for our 
purposes, whicli could be rented as a home for the large 
body of men. The farm was very carefully inspected by 
members of the committee and by agricultural experts, and 
was found to be almost exactly what we wanted. More 
than fifty acres of the farm were covered with apple and 
pear trees, the fruit ready for picking. There were crops 
to be gathered, large quantities of wood waiting to be 



120 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

sawed and sold, threshing of the grain to be done, corn 
to be husked, and a multitude of other lines of work inviting 
eager, active men. There was a large summer boarding- 
house on the farm, capable of holding one hundred and 
fifty persons, but without any heating facilities for the 
winter and a spacious farm-house which could be trans- 
formed and fitted as winter quarters for a large group of 
men. We arranged a lease of the place and divided the 
men between Merion Hall and the Rosedale Farm. Those 
who were nearly ready to sail, and who were in the last 
stages of preparation for departure, were assigned to the 
former place, and those who had a longer stage of waiting 
before them went to Rosedale. These arrangements were 
hardly more than effected when the epidemic of influenza 
fell upon this part of the world. Our men in both quar- 
ters volunteered at once for hospital duties and almost 
every one of the men went out to some form of service for 
the sick and the dying in the two neighborhoods where they 
lived. Some of them of course took the disease but no 
one of them succumbed to it. Their help in this crisis was 
a godsend and it was received with fervent appreciation. 

Murray Kenworthy lived for a time with the men at 
Rosedale as warden and when he had to return home 
Thomas K. Brown, formerly principal of Westtown School, 
was asked to become house-father to the family, a position 
which he filled with devotion and marked success. 

The men set to work with a will to pick the plentiful 
fruit of the farm, sort it into grades and sell it; to cut 
and husk the corn-crop ; to make apple-butter and cider of 
some of the apples; to build on a lean-to kitchen to the 
farm-house; to set up shower-baths and washing arrange- 
ments in one of the porches; to make a sewage-disposal 
plant ; and, since the water was found to be unsanitary, to 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 121 

bore a well and set up a water-system. About the middle 
of December the men moved into the farm-house, which 
was from that time on used exclusively. In addition to the 
tasks already mentioned, the men had to care for the stock 
and were also hired out to neighboring farmers to help pay 
for the cost of their keep and the improvements they were 
forced to make in the house. 

It was interesting to find that for every task that pre- 
sented itself some man among the number offered himself 
as an expert, or at least a competent performer of the 
work. A man who had had his ear-drums broken by 
brutality in camp was discovered to be an expert fruit- 
grower, and organized the grading, selling and buying in 
connection with the fruit. Another had been technical in- 
structor at a Dunkard college, and was of material assist- 
ance in directing and helping with the engineering feats; 
several carpenters presented themselves, one mess expert, 
while a large proportion of the men were competent farmers. 
They were a strongly religious group. They held a mid- 
week service, attended neighboring places of worship on 
First Day, and often had a service for themselves in the 
evening as well. Many Friends and others visited them 
to help with these services. 

Altogether Rosedale Farm was occupied by the men for 
only five months, and towards the end of the time the men 
were being shifted at such a rate that almost the whole 
group would change ever}^ fortnight. This was, of course, 
very difficult for the work, and added much to complica- 
tions of managing the farm and home. When the use of 
the farm came to an end the committee had made about 
$4000 by the sale of fruit, apple-butter and wood, and had 
been largely able to provide the entire body of men with 
food. This income went a good ways towards covering the 



122 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

cost of the experiment, though owing to the exceptional 
difficulties it was never quite self-supporting. The spirit 
of the place, the warm comradeship, the atmosphere of wil- 
ling service for no return was delightful to experience, and 
will remain a bright memory for all those engaged in the 
work at Rosedale Farm, and for those also who had the 
management of it. 

The total number of men turned over to us on furlough 
was exactly two hundred. It would, of course,- have been 
very much larger had not the armistice brought release to 
the men in the camps soon after the furlough system got 
well into working shape. It was noteworthy that as the 
armistice came into force and brought to the men the op- 
portunity to be released from their farm-furloughs, the 
great majority of them came to the Service Committee to 
volunteer of their own free will for a year's service in 
France. 

Our next and last important task in connection with the 
conscientious objectors under the draft was to secure from 
the War Department an arrangement by which all our 
men in France^ who were technically counted as drafted 
men, could be discharged without returning to the camps 
at which they were ''inducted." We naturally wanted a 
form of release that would cover not only the furloughed 
men, but also as well the men abroad who had been 
''called" and had had their call "delayed" by special ar- 
rangement. We were told by all officials whom we visited 
in Washington that no arrangement could be made to grant 
"discharges" to any men until they presented themselves 
at the camp which they had entered. It appeared, how- 
ever, from our interviews that the chief -of -staff was the per- 
son of final authority in such matters. We asked for an 
interview with him. At that time General Marsh was 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 123 

abroad and General Jervey was acting-chief. He was 
unspeakably busy, but, as we were well introduced by per- 
sons of authority, he interrupted another interview and 
received us. I told him what we wanted. His answer was : 
**It cannot be done. There is no arrangement by which 
anybody can have a 'release' without coming home." A 
burst of faith and inspiration came to me and, in a flash, I 
pictured to him what our work in France meant and what 
disaster it would involve to bring the men home for their 
discharges. He showed instant interest and asked a num- 
ber of questions about the men and their work, and re- 
marked, "It would be a shame to upset such a work." I 
earnestly pressed my request and to my joy he said: ''I 
will see that a plan is arranged to accomplish this. You 
may count on it." It was happily accomplished as prom- 
ised and the ''furloughs" came to an end. 

We did, furthermore, a very large amount of work, early 
and late toward the relief of prisoners at Fort Leavenworth 
and in other military prisons and we did what could be 
done to secure amnesty for those who were suffering for 
conscience' sake. We also presented to the officials in 
charge of the S. A. T. C. (Students Army Training Corps) 
the attitude of the Friends Colleges and secured from the 
officials a positive approval of the consistent policy which 
fitted the ideals of these institutions, namely that they 
should continue to offer their usual courses of study. It 
should be said before closing this chapter that the business, 
so briefly sketched in it, took those of us who conducted it 
before a very large number of government officials and 
army officers. We always made our religious position as 
clear to them as was possible. Even in the most critical 
times we kept our central loyalty to our spiritual ideals 
in the foreground of all our efforts. No concealment of our 



124 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

principles was ever thought of, nor was any conscious com- 
promise ever allowed to color our statements. And yet we 
had the most polite and sympathetic treatment on every 
hand. Everybody seemed to understand. They met us 
with fair and open minds. Officers accustomed to com- 
mand, and raised to a pinnacle of dignity, talked with us 
on a basis of easy freedom and allowed us to debate every 
point at will. When the board of inquiry made its first 
report in person to the War Department I was unexpect- 
edly invited in with them and was allowed to hear all the 
details of their experiences in the camps and their reac- 
tions upon all matters concerning the C. O.'s. Whatever 
the officials with whom we dealt may have thought of war 
in general, they appeared to be glad that there was a group 
of Christians left in the world who still took Christ's way 
of life seriously and who in the face of grave difficulties 
were endeavoring to practice it.^ 

This will, perhaps, be the proper place to express an 
appreciation of the cooperation and fellowship of the 
Mennonites of the Old Order. Their young men stood the 
test of the camps with insight and with much bravery. 
They had the backing of their Church and they were con- 
scious that they were its standard-bearers. They became 
closely united in fellowship with our men in the camps 
and they shared with them the desire to make a positive 
contribution in service abroad. Groups of Mennonites 
met many times with groups of Friends. We usually kept 
them informed of our movements and plans, and they finally 
decided to encourage their young men to volunteer for our 
work or to accept furloughs for it where opportunity of- 

1 1 want particularly to mention with deep appreciation the names 
and Col. Herman. Captain Hough of Camp Sherman understood the 
C. 0. problem more clearly than did any other officer with whom the 
boys had to deal. 



FURLOUGHED FOR RECONSTRUCTION 125 

fered. Nearly sixty of their members, thus, went abroad 
under our committee. They were excellent workers and 
they brought a fine spirit of devotion and cooperation to 
the mission. They merged with the Friends with a natural 
grace and we always thought of them as a part of ourselves. 
The Mennonites in every part of America contributed with 
liberality to the work, sending a total of more than 
two hundred thousand dollars. Representatives of this 
body met by invitation with us on the occasions of our 
general committee meetings and in a close and intimate 
way shared with us in the Mission of Love. They have 
taken a very noble part in the endeavor to rebuild the old 
waste places. They have also had a part in most of our 
other fields of lajbor. 



CHAPTER X 

IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 

The central office of our American Unit was in the Paris 
headquarters of the American Red Cross. In the early 
period this was at 4 Place de la Concorde and later in the 
Hotel Retina, Place de Rivoli. Charles Evans, as already- 
indicated, was chief of our American Unit from the time 
of his arrival in Paris in September, 1917, until his return 
home in November, 1918, when he was succeeded by Charles 
J. Rhoads of Philadelphia, who had already for some time 
been associated with him in the Paris office. The im- 
portance of the leadership of these two men cannot well 
be overstated. They were gifted with insight; they en- 
tered intimately into all that concerned the life of all the 
members of the group ; they knew how to work harmoniously 
in cooperation with the English Friends and at the same 
time with the Red Cross ; they understood the French mind ; 
they possessed unusual financial ability, and they shared 
and vitally expressed the ideals of the mission. They both 
made very great sacrifices when they went out to take up 
this work of ours, and they gave themselves unsparingly 
while they were there. I shall not often refer specifically 
to these men by name, but it can always be understood that 
they had an indispensable part in shaping the work in 
France. Joseph H. Haines was a very helpful assistant 
to the two Friends mentioned above, and he proved his 
ability and fine spirit throughout his period of service. 

126 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 127 

The Paris problems were always complicated. Every 
equipe of workers had its peculiar nest of difficulties. The 
chief of each equipe was elected by the workers who be- 
longed to it, and within limits the little group was self- 
governing. But many of its problems were sure to filter 
in to Paris. Besides our American headquarters the 
united mission had another central headquarters which was 
at 53 Rue de Rivoli. Here were located the offices of the 
executive secretary, Wilfrid Shewell — a rare man with a 
fine level head — and the office of the treasurer, Ralph 
Elliott of England, and later Walter Bowerman of America, 
and here, too, centered many of the important activities of 
the mission. Many of the equipe problems were naturally 
dealt with at 53 Rue de Rivoli and many came to the Amer- 
ican chief. There were many chances for friction and mis- 
understanding in the somewhat more than double-headed 
plan of management. But, as a matter of actual fact and 
practice, it worked well. It worked well just because the 
persons who were charged with the management were of the 
broad, understanding type, untrammeled by red tape and 
narrow officialism, and ready to see what was the best way 
to handle each individual case as it arose. Sometimes 53 
Rue de Rivoli would take a matter of adjustment in hand 
and sometimes it would be done by the American office, and 
whenever one of the two leaders worked out the solution, the 
staff of the other office regarded it as though done by itself. 
Once more, and that, too, in matters where efficiency was a 
prime requisite the Friendly method of doing things worked 
well and brought excellent results. 

It was somewhat similar also with the two home bases 
of management. The American Service Committee in 
Philadelphia and the War Victims Committee in London 
might easily have been at loggerheads much of the time. 



128 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Both were directing and financing the same work. To each 
belonged the selection and care of its own body of workers. 
Each committee was autonomous and was absorbed with its 
own peculiar tasks, and yet, with three thousand miles of 
ocean between them and despite the fact that their two 
bands of workers were merged into a single Mission in a 
country remote from either base, the work ran smoothly and 
the relations remained close, intimate and friendly. This 
happy issue was in good measure due to the spirit which 
infused the whole undertaking, and to the peculiar fitness 
of the heads of the Paris group where the complications and 
acute situations had to be threshed out and settled. It is a 
good rule that the right person shoiild always he chosen to 
head any important undertaking! 

Besides the division of the workers in the Mission into 
a multitude of local self-governing equipes the forces were 
also divided into differentiated departments, each with its 
department-head. At first the main interest had been med- 
ical and then secondly relief for suffering refugees, but by 
the time we Americans entered the Mission reconstruction 
of villages had become a very prominent feature. In the 
period of joint work the departments of the Service were 
Medical, Building, Works, Manufacturing, Agriculture and 
Relief. 1 These six types of service involved also a trans- 
port department, a department of maintenance and one of 
equipment. I shall not find it possible to deal at length 
with the departments which ministered primarily to the 
Mission itself, but it should be understood by the reader 
that these departments were absolutely essential to the 
existence of the Mission and to the efficiency of the work. 
It was not by any means a small matter to keep this large 

1 At a later period, as we shall see, there was a Department of 
Purchase and Sales. 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 129 

body of workers fed, clothed and supplied with the material 
by which they did their work. Motor transport was, too, 
a vital factor. The men and women who drove cars, trucks 
and lorries were as close to the heart of the Mission as were 
any of the star workers. Their contribution made all other 
forms of contribution possible. 

IManufacturing, works and building were of course closely 
affiliated. The first had to do with the direction and opera- 
tion of the two house building factories at Dole and Ornans, 
of which more will be said in due time. ' 'Works" had to do 
with the work of preparing buildings to house the equipes 
and all forms of work which had to do with building and 
repair for the Mission itself. The building department had 
oversight of the actual construction of the villages in which 
the houses made by the manufacturing department, or other- 
wise secured, were put up. These departments through 
their chief made reports at each meeting of the Paris Execu- 
tive Committee when a budget for the coming month of 
work was made up, and the work of co-operation was guided 
both by these meetings and by the unifying agency of the 
Executive Secretary and his staff. The Paris Executive 
Committee was a very interesting representative body. Its 
meetings generally lasted for two days and enabled all who 
attended them to get and to keep a pretty firm grasp of the 
entire field of work. 

As soon as we had a fair prospect of receiving a large 
group of furloughed men for work abroad we began to 
work out a plan for a second unit of American workers. 
The Red Cross, which was in great need of workers in 
France for its civilian activities, agreed to cover the ex- 
penses of the men in Unit No. 2, but they were still to 
remain under our care and oversight. It was essential 
that we should secure a good, wise understanding man as 



130 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the responsible head of this new group. We chose William 
C. Biddle of New York who, like all our other leaders, gave 
up much that held him here when he went forth to the 
work, and he, too, made a very important contribution to the 
success of the work. This second Unit was not merged with 
the English Friends, though the members of it were in 
close and intimate relations with the Mission. Their ex- 
periences had prepared them in a peculiar way for service 
and they were penetrated with the spirit and with the 
ideals of the Friends. They formed a ' ' flying corps" of ef- 
ficient men, ready for almost any service which the Red 
Cross needed to have accomplished. Groups of these men 
constructed hospitals and equipped them, built barracks for 
tuberculous patients, took charge of expositions of methods 
for the care and welfare of little children, assisted in the 
relief of prisoners, took part in the work to ease the condi- 
tion of persons who had gone insane during the war, and 
in numerous other ways contributed to the extension of 
hospital work. Sometimes workers who were originally a 
part of Unit No. 1 were 'loaned" to the Red Cross for 
definite pieces of work. In cases of this type they might 
be transferred to Unit No. 2 or they might, for the ''loaned" 
period, become regular members of the Red Cross force, 
according to circumstances. 

Lewis S. Gannett, one of the members of the original 
Haverford Unit, has written a vivid account of some of the 
forms of service performed by these men; 

"The first call for man-power came from Toul, where the Red 
Cross was trying to turn the barracks of a military school into 
a healthy and happy home for some 500 refugee children under 
eight years of age, who had been sent away from their mothers 
in the frontier villages because there was continual danger of gas 
attacks. In connection with the refuge a hospital was estab- 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 131 

lished for the civilians of frontier Lorraine who had been without 
adequate medical care since their doctors were mobilized in 1914. 
To this hospital six men were sent. They did odd jobs of car- 
pentry, installed a playground and carpenter shop for the 
children, and finished a hundred and one other bits of work 
which the doctors and nurses had not been able to get done. 
When Nancy came under heavy bombardment by long-reinge 
cannon and air-bombs, word came to Toul that the Nancy mater- 
nity hospital would have to be transferred to the barracks on 
a few hours' notice; the heads of the hospital give eloquent 
testimony to the work which the Quakers did in scrubbing the 
disused building, putting up beds, and making the other neces- 
sary preparations. Two hours after the Toul Maternite was 
opened its first baby came into the world. 

"Then came the work at Chateau Hachette. When that exten- 
sive property with an unusually beautiful park, was offered to 
the English Friends for tuberculosis refugees, they realized that 
it probably should be considered in the general scheme of tuber- 
culosis work which the Red Cross and the Rockefeller Commis- 
sion for the Prevention of Tuberculosis were undertaking, and 
they referred it to the former organization. In November the 
Red Cross obtained the use of the estate, rent free, and six 
weeks later, on Christmas day, the first patients were received. 
In the interim every American Friend who was delayed at Paris 
waiting for passes had been working hard under the direction 
of Haldane Robinson, one of the English Friends, to finish the 
papering, plastering, carpentry, plumbing, glazing, and painting 
necessary to turn an orangerie into a ward, an outbuilding into 
a children's pavilion, a chateau into a modern hospital. The work 
at Hachette kept up all through the winter and at one time or 
another almost every one had a hand in it. 

"In the spring the Red Cross began an extensive experunent 
on an estate a short distance from Hachette — the buildmg of a 
village of portable houses to care for refugee families in which 
there are one or more tuberculosis members. The 'village' will 
have a house for each family, a store, playground, baths, and, 



132 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

of course, quarters for the doctors and nurses who will supervise 
the whole so that the sick may become better and the well escape 
the infection. After the war each family can take its portable 
house back to its devastated village in the war zone. This village, 
together with the Hachette estate, go under the general name 
of the Edward L. Trudeau Sanatorium, in memory of the great 
American tuberculosis expert who was of French parentage. 
Charles Parnell and Ralph Whitely are at work in the sana- 
torium proper as orderlies, and some thirty-five Friends are 
building the village, — Robinson, and Reginald Dann, of the 
English Friends, Frank Cholerton, of the American Friends 
Unit No. 1, and thirty-two members of Unit No. 2, the body of 
Americans brought over at the request of the Red Cross to do 
the more extensive pieces of Red Cross work for which sufficient 
men could not be taken from the regular Friends equipes. 
Early last autumn one worker was borrowed by the Red Cross to 
assist in organizing a special factory for the manufacture of 
artificial limbs for French war cripples; two others were lent 
for editorial work in which they had special experience; another 
was assigned as an assistant in the organization of an agricul- 
tural training center for French war cripples. 

"Two men have gone to assist the mutile farm, and the chief 
of the Bureau for the Re-education of Mutiles is clamoring for 
three more men. Another helper will probably be assigned to 
run a dairy farm at La Chaux, near Lyons, where the Red Cross 
has a convalescent camp for several hundred Paris and Lyons 
slum children. 

"In November some six hundred children from occupied Bel- 
gium, sickly and under-nourished, were sent to France, through 
Switzerland, to be cared for in a refuge established in a former 
Chartreuse monastery at Le Glandier under the joint auspices of 
the Queen of the Belgians and the Red Cross. Two English 
Friends and two Americans were sent to teach the boys healthy 
American games, to organize Boy Scout troops, and do anything 
else that might be asked of them. These Belgian children came 
from Liege, a factory city of coal and iron; they did not know 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 133 

how to play : apparently they never had known or had forgotten 
under the rigors of three years of German rule; and they felt 
strange and homesick in the country. The success of the Friends 
in helping to make them normally vigorous and happy children 
is attested by request for more such workers which the Queen's 
representative in charge of the school made to the Friends. 

"A baby saving exhibit was opened by the Red Cross at Lyons 
on April 9th, and attracted 173,000 visitors in the three weeks 
of its existence. Half-a-dozen of our workers helped arrange 
exhibits, put up signs, gave out literature, played football with the 
boys in its model playgrounds, and did other odd jobs. In June 
they went on with the exposition to Marseilles. Five workers 
were assigned to help in the permanent playgrounds established 
at Lyons. Some of these two groups of men will be detailed to 
the convalescent camp at La Chaux, near Lyons, to erect the 
wooden barracks which are to increase the capacity of the camp 
by several hundred children. 

"The German offensive in March brought emergencies in which 
every member of the war zone equipes was called upon to play 
special parts ; and as the aftermath of that work, several specially 
trained members of the units have continued in Red Cross work 
for these refugees. A group of Friends went to Eaux Bonnes 
in the Pyrenees to help care for some hundreds of evacues driven 
from their homes in the Somme before the German advance. 
Eaux Bonnes has since become a regular Friends' equipe. 

"When the German offensive in late May drove thousands of 
homeless folk from their villages in the Aisne and the Marne, the 
Red Cross turned to the Friends for aid in managing the very 
critical situation which it produced in the Aube, just south of the 
invaded or threatened country. Dorothy North, who has been 
a member of the relief equipe at Troyes since last autumn, has 
been appointed to the important position of delegate for the Red 
Cross Bureau of Refugees at that strategic point, where her 
knowledge of the conditions and the work will be especially 
valuable. 

"One of the latest requests, also from the Bureau of Refugees, 



134 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

was for workers at Evian, where hundreds of rapatries, returned 
to France by the German authorities, enter the country at the 
Swiss frontier. Three men have gone to take charge of a canteen 
where the thirsty travellers can get lemonade and other sweet 
drinks after their long and uncomfortable journey. Another 
worker has been detailed to drive an automobile for the Shurtleff 
Memorial Fund, one of the excellent Paris charities for refugees 
with which the Red Cross works in close cooperation. 

"In the recent rush of weary refugees through the Paris stations, 
as many as thirty-five or forty Friends have been on duty some 
days, or some nights, carrying luggage, washing dishes in the 
emergency canteens, giving medical aid, befriending the unhappy 
people forced from their homes. A. C. HoUiday heroically 
donned an apron and has been cooking in an improvised kitchen 
seven days a week, many hours a day, making the cocoa, coffee 
and hot soup that are given to the hundreds of travellers at that 
station before they pass on. 

"Without the Friends the Red Cross probably could not have 
undertaken its great tuberculosis center at Hachette and the 
model village which is unique in medical history; in other enter- 
prises they have given the all-essential aid, usually unromantic 
hard manual work, which has pushed the venture through to suc- 
cess. These accomplishments are marked up to the credit of the 
Friends in the memories of the Red Cross officials in Paris and 
of the directors of the institutions to whose aid they have come; 
but it is well that the Friends at home also should know how well 
many uninteresting but all-essential tasks have been done and 
how readily emergencies have been met. ^Quakers proving in- 
valuable' was the verdict sent by Edward Eyre Hunt, Red Cross 
head of the emergency relief for civilians, in the battle of 
Picardy, and he is not alone in his judgment." 

Another one of our workers has given an impressive ac- 
count of the scene of work among the refugees at Evian-les- 
Bains : 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 135 

"Many of the refugees were sent home into France, via Switz- 
erland, in huge convoys and arrived at Evian-les-Bains on the 
French shore of Lake Geneva. When the frontier was open two 
special trains brought in some 1,300 of these forlorn and desti- 
tute people daily. I shall never forget the sight of one of these 
convoy trains coming in. A French band played the national 
airs to welcome them and the people peered from the car win- 
dows, many of them like dazed and terrified animals. Some were 
weeping, others were singing, shouting, clapping and cheering, 
and some were silent and expressionless. They were pale, tired, 
thin and worn, and entire strangers all of them in that section 
of their fatherland. Some were incurably ill and had come home 
to die, some were on stretchers, some on crutches. It was the 
moment they had been longing for for four long years — the 
moment of home-coming — and yet it was not home, and they 
were separated from all who were near and dear to them. They 
trudged through the town to the big casino where the Service de 
Rapatriement handled this throng of people with wonderful 
efficiency. It was splendidly organized. There were great 
pavilions of baths and all of the people had shower baths, and 
had their clothes fumigated. They then had supper or breakfast, 
as the case might be, in the huge auditorium. The band played 
and the prefet or mayor made a stirring speech of welcome and 
recounted to them all their hardships till every face was bathed in 
tears. Next they proceeded to the registration bureau where 
they tried to learn some news of their families whom they had 
lost all trace of for three or four years. And here they heard 
both welcome and tragic news. I have never seen a sadder sight. 
One felt that one should not be there and one could not gaze upon 
their sorrow. 

"After that they were ushered into the social service depart- 
ment and their financial condition was inquired into and those who 
were penniless were given a few francs by the government to 
last them a week or so. They next had a medical examination. 
Those who were very ill were sent to hospitals, those who were 



136 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

fit were allocated to go to various towns in the interior of France 
to there take up their life anew, and those who were convales- 
cent or very markedly below par were allotted to institutions like 
the one at Samoens (to be described in a later chapter). 

"And so the throng passed, like cattle, from one department 
to another and finally all were labelled to go to certain hotels in 
Evian until time for their trains to depart, and were supplied 
with railway tickets with no choice in the matter as to where 
they were to go. They remained in Evian from 24 to 48 hours 
and were housed in hotels like sardines in a box." 

Paul Elliott wrote thus of the Child- welfare exposition: 
"The exposition was taken very seriously. Mothers and 
fathers brought their children by the hundreds to be exam- 
ined by the doctors. Every day many more applied for 
numbers designating their turn with the various doctors for 
examination than could possibly be examined. Mothers 
read and kept for reference the literature which was given 
them as they left the exposition. It dealt with babies' 
health and care ; feeding of children ; care of teeth ; preven- 
tion of tuberculosis, and many other things. ' ' 

Christopher Roberts, a Haverford student who volun- 
teered for work in Unit No. 2, gave a glimpse in one of his 
letters of the fine help these men gave to the rapatries as 
they came in from their awful experiences behind the lines. 
He says : 

"Our work was a case of necessity as there was no provision 
whatever for feeding them otherwise. Fortunately we had the 
provisions. The word came at six in the evening, and by dint of 
staying up nearly all night, we were prepared at six the next 
morning to give breakfast to 600 and to give the same 600 each a 
package of food to take with him. The same thing occurred two 
days later when a train load of 650 insane people came in with 
only a few hours' warning. At the expiration of the two hours, 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 137 

each of the 650 insane persons was provided with a lunch done 
up for the trip. 

"On Sunday a train of 500 civil prisoners arrived at Evian 
as the result of an exchange arrangement. These were largely the 
notables of the cities or the most influential citizens of the villages 
of Northern France. They had been taken as hostages by the 
Germans, ostensibly as an insurance of the treatment of the 
civilians of Alsace made prisoners by the French. The conditions 
under which these people have been living for the past four 
years have been very severe. Many of them are those of com- 
fortable circumstances before the war and they have felt very 
keenly the privations and suffering to which they have been 
subjected." 

It became necessary, of course, to have a home for the 
men of Unit No. 2 v^hen they were in Paris, as they occa- 
sionally v^ere v^hile being shifted from one piece of work to 
another. It was important, too, to have a home for the new 
men when they arrived from America, an abiding place 
while they were making arrangements for their field of 
service. For this purpose the Hostel of the Women 
Students attending the University of Paris was taken over, 
located at 93 Boulevard St. Michel. It was admirably 
suited to be a home for our men and here they gathered 
from all parts of America, Friends, Mennonites, and many 
others. To those who had been through the ordeal of the 
camps it seemed a haven of peace and joy. To everybody 
it became a home. 

Josiah Marvel of Richmond, Indiana, an Earlham grad- 
uate, was put in charge of this hostel and at once revealed 
marked capacity for his interesting work. He took a real 
interest in all the men. He was not only provider, enter- 
tainer, and host, but, more than that, a friend to all who 
came to the Hostel. William C. Biddle lived with the men 



138 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

in the Hostel and entered into all that concerned not only 
their work but their life as well. Lillie F. Rhoads (Mrs. 
Charles J. Rhoads) and her cousin, Anita Bliss, of New 
York, came nearly every day to the Hostel, usually in time 
to serve afternoon tea to the men who could be there. They 
looked after their mending and in a multitude of ways 
they brought a beautiful atmosphere of home and fellow- 
ship to the Hostel. Hither came the little groups of men as 
they arrived from America, and from here w^as made the 
departure of those who returned to America during the 
period covered by the lease of the Hostel; here were held 
the Sunday evening meetings for the group of Friends in 
Paris, and here, again, were celebrated many occasions both 
of joy and sorrow which touched the lives of individuals 
and groups. Here in the Hostel in January, 1919, was held 
the first session of the continental monthly meeting, estab- 
lished by the authority of the London Meeting for Suffer- 
ings, and consisting of the Friends composing the Mission 
and others who wished to join in fellowship with them. 
Soon after the signing of the armistice and the closing of 
the work of the Red Cross, the men in Unit No. 2 were 
absorbed into the Mission. 

Besides the Hostel there was another famous living center 
for the workers, the Hotel Britannique in Rue Victoria. 
This far outdated the Hostel, having been in operation long 
before our American workers began to arrive. It was for 
both men and women who belonged to the Mission and was 
managed by the Mission itself. At different times the chief 
housekeeper of the Britannique was selected from the list of 
American women in the Unit, though more usually the 
menage was in care of an English Friend. The group 
living at the Britannique was composed of men and women 
from both countries, with an occasional Canadian or Aus- 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 139 

tralian added for good measure. When the Hostel was not 
in operation meetings were held at the Britanniqne, and 
here, likewise, many passing events and occasions of interest 
took place. The Hotel Britannique will always be a center 
crowded with memories for all members of the Mission, and 
both centers played an important role in the history of our 
work. 

As I have said, there were times of sorrow as well as of 
joy, and it should be added there were many times of 
anxiety and suspense. For months Paris was a sphere of 
constant danger. Our workers who were in Paris in periods 
of bombardment or air-raids, lived night and day exposed 
to bomb and shell. The Hostel was leased to us because 
the students had felt forced to vacate it and to go to places 
of safety. No one ever knew when one of the death-dealing 
missiles might cleave through one of our homes, but we have 
cause for great thanksgiving that no member of the Mission 
was struck down by the weapons from the skies. More 
dangerous still was the pestilence in the form of influenza. 
This invaded all centers and brought many of our workers 
to a condition of gravity. There were days of anxious 
watching, and a few of the beloved fellowship were taken 
away into the silence. Walter Carrol Brinton, a fine de- 
voted youth, well-equipped, full of promise and with a year 
of splendid service behind him, was taken from the group in 
the Chateau Hospital at Sermaize. Ezra Moore, of North 
Carolina, was stricken down just as he was sailing for home 
from Brest. Earlier in the history of our work, before 
the influenza came, another member was suddenly taken 
from us through an automobile accident which endangered 
other lives also. This was Daniel Arthur Compton of Plain- 
field, New Jersey. He was one of the original Haverford 
Unit, a bright, happy spirit, an excellent influence, and a 



140 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

member who was greatly missed when the sad event removed 
him from the fellowship. Others who are happily still left 
to complete their career had narrow escapes and passed 
through close crises. A few of the men will always bear 
the marks of injuries received. Some came into too close 
contact with the revolving saws or with the planer and 
some suffered from the explosives left behind by the armies 
on the fields where they worked. While our sympathy is 
abundant for those who had to pass through hard experi- 
ences, we must feel at the same time deep thanksgiving that 
the catastrophes were so few and that so many out of the 
large force of workers came through unscathed. 

All told, the American working force that came into Paris 
and was sifted out for the various types of work in the 
outlying zones amounted to six hundred persons. Of 
these about five hundred and fifty were men and slightly 
over fifty were women. It seems an unfair proportion, 
but it must be remembered that the work in the main 
was agriculture and reconstruction, and secondly that 
the young men who were of draft age were eager to find 
service abroad where they could reveal by deeds of love the 
spirit which was in them, and they naturally received es- 
pecial attention on the part of the Service Committee. We 
always sent, however, all the women workers for whom we 
received calls from Paris and for whom they had openings 
for service. It was a definite policy that no woman should 
go into that maelstrom unless there was positive evidence 
that her skillful hands were needed and that she could do 
something far more important in Prance than she could in 
America. 

It was my good fortune to visit all the equipes in the 
winter of 1918-1919. My first concern was to note the 
morale of the workers, to discover what spirit animated them 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 141 

and to see what effect the months of work had had upon 
their lives. The impression which I formed was expressed 
as follows : ^'I find our workers much deepened in life and 
character. They have lived in a world full of difficulties, 
and they have had temptations of an unusual sort, but they 
are beyond question stronger and better persons because of 
their experiences. They almost never talk about them- 
selves. They do not analyze what has been happening 
within themselves. They do not talk either about their 
growth in spirit or about their enlarged vision. They focus 
their attention on their work and they are for the most 
part unconscious about their 4nsides,' like those people 
in the parable of the great surprise, who asked, with per- 
fect simplicity, 'When saw we thee hungry and fed thee, 
or thirsty and gave thee drink, or when saw we thee naked 
and clothed thee, sick or in prison and visited thee ! ' 

*'I saw, however, in man after man, and woman after 
woman, an increased depth of life, a richer nature and a 
more dedicated, spirit. They have found themselves. They 
have discovered how to get out of their more or less self- 
centered lives and to make themselves instruments of real 
service to others and transmitters of a spirit of love. Some 
of them went over before they quite knew their own minds. 
They were confronted by a situation unlike any they had 
ever met before. They were patriotic, full of love for their 
country, and solidly opposed to that spirit of ruthlessness 
which had destroyed Belgium and carried such awful havoc 
into the prosperous towns of Northern France. But they 
were at the same time sincerely and profoundly opposed to 
the entire method of war. They had never thought out 
their faith and conviction. They held it as they held many 
other deep-seated religious views and positions that had 
come into their lives almost with their mother's milk. They 



142 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

had always assumed that these truths were so, but they did 
not know why they were so. They could not give a reason 
for the faith that was in them. Suddenly they found them- 
selves face to face with the most momentous issues of life. 
They had to decide where they would stand, and the choice 
forced them down to the deepest roots of their being. 

' ' Many of those who volunteered for the service of love in 
France did it because they felt in their souls that they could 
not do otherwise. They could not run counter to the faith 
that had slowly been formed within them. There were 
others, however, who did not see their way as clearly or as 
surely as that. They only knew that they hated war and 
wanted to avoid having any direct share in it if possible. 
The service in France was to them a way out of the stem 
dilemma and they took it without thinking out the main 
problem or settling the central issue. A few of them soon 
found that they were not in their right place, and they 
changed over to other types of service. Most of them, on 
the other hand, living near neighbors to the horrors of war, 
thought through the entire moral problem and re-formed 
their faith on a higher level and deepened their conviction 
with first hand positive insight. 

* ' The arrival of groups of men who had stood the long, 
hard tests of the army camps, the court martial, the guard 
house, the prison at Leavenworth or Riley, brought into the 
equip es a fresh, new energy of faith and had the effect of 
raising the level and morale of the whole body of workers. 
There may still be wavering individuals and there may be 
here and there a man who had stayed on in France because 
it was the line of least resistance. But if such are there, I 
did not discover them. I found men of genuine faith and 
conviction who were working out with head and hands and 
heart the clear insight which their experience had formed 



IN PARIS AT THE CENTER 143 

within them. They went over immature and inarticulate ; 
they are coming back men who have been tested in the fire 
and are now, as the steel-makers say, 'bloom-fumaced.' 

''They are too, I think, equally clarified and deepened in 
their religious experience. It is never possible to verify 
sweeping conclusions and in any case religion is an affair of 
the individual soul and not of groups and bunches of people 
taken in the mass. I can only say that I talked with many 
who have been drawing closer to God for strength and 
power, and who have been learning far from home and 
friends and early influences, that love has no frontiers and 
that it works even when no other method does. ' ' 

With this brief review of the methods of organization 
and conditions of life and work in Paris, we are now ready 
to turn to the concrete tasks in the working zones where the 
Mission has had its fields of operation. 



CHAPTER XI 

MEDICAL WORK 

The health condition of the civilian population in the 
devastated areas of France was appalling and became ever 
more serious as year by year the tragedy accumulated. 
Everything was done that could be done to give prompt care 
and attention to the wounds and illnesses of the soldiers, 
but so enormous were the tasks and problems to be grappled 
with that the suffering peasants and the diseased and dying 
children were overlooked. Every wrecked village had its 
long tale of woes. Under-feeding brought, as it always does, 
its terrible toll of ills which were vastly increased because 
the local doctor was no longer there to help. It was natural 
and right, therefore, that Friends should provide, from the 
first days of their work of relief, for the medical and surgi- 
cal care of the civilians left in the wake of the great tornado 
of war. The English Friends, at every point of their work, 
showed fine humanitarian instinct joined with much wis- 
dom. They got straight at the central needs of the situa- 
tion and blazed the road in precisely the right place. When 
we merged with them in the autumn of 1917 we found our- 
selves connected with a very efficiently organized method 
of relief in full operation, with a splendid system of hos- 
pitals for various types of cases. 

The most impressive single center in the hospital system 
at that time was the Maternity Hospital at Chalons-sur 
Marne. This had been established in the awful days of 
chaos immediately after the first Battle of the Marne. No 

144 



MEDICAL WORK 145 

other form of relief seemed at this time more urgent than 
that of providing a quiet retreat and skillful helpers for 
expectant mothers whose homes had been crushed like an 
egg-shell and who were in many instances shelterless and 
desolate. Dr. Hilda Clark of England was the leader in 
this merciful plan of assistance. Edith M. Pye, a nurse of 
large experience and rare skill, and a woman of fine quali- 
ties of character and ability, became the head of this home 
for mothers and little children. A number of our American 
workers were joined to the Maternity Hospital staff and be- 
came closely identified with its work. The importance of 
Chalons as a city and its position as a railway center ex- 
posed it to furious bombardments. It was shelled both from 
long range guns and from the sky. Many a child came 
into the world in this place of ''nativity" at Chalons amid 
the din of explosives and was greeted with noises which 
drowned its cries of surprise and wonder. In the late sum- 
mer of 1918 the danger from shells became too great to be 
endured longer. It appeared necessary to "evacuate" and 
go to a safer retreat. Already eight hundred babies had 
been born there. The institution had grown to considerable 
size. Besides the building occupied by the ''Maternity" 
there was a separate home for the nurses. Three houses ad- 
joining one another and not far distant from the hospital 
were used as a creche for the little ones. There was much 
to move besides the mothers and babies, but the motor lorries 
effected the evacuation without mishap. The new home 
selected for the hospital was at Mery about forty miles from 
Chalons, and four cars full were moved the first day. One 
baby was born the first evening at Mery, out of range of 
the guns and noise. Every hour the danger at Chalons was 
increasing. Miss Pye's account of what followed is inter- 
esting. She wrote as follows : 



146 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

"It had been arranged for all the ears except one to return 
to Chalons for the night. This was fortunate, as the offensive 
started at midnight; and when the shells from the long-range 
gun began to fall in the fields surrounding the Maternity, the 
few remaining babies and children, who were to have been sent 
down the next day, were packed into the cars and sent off at 
once, arriving at Mery about 6 a. m._, with the exception of one 
mother whose baby was bom during the night. She was taken 
down during the course of the day. The chauffeurs were driving 
or seeing to their cars continuously from 7 a. m. on Sunday till 
late Monday evening, without an hour's rest and very little time 
for meals. 

"The shelling from long-range guns continued all day on Mon- 
day and up till 4 a. m. on Tuesday, the shells bursting all around 
the Maternity. Very little actual damage was done by them, 
though the explosions were objectionably noisy. 

"On Monday night the first air raid took place, lasting about 
two hours. Durmg this, another baby was born whose mother 
had not been fit to send on Monday. Early Tuesday morning the 
cars took this mother and two others with new-born babies from 
the town down to safety. On Tuesday night a squadron started 
bombing at 10 p. M. and went on till midnight, again from 2 a. m. 
to 2 :30, and from 3 a. m. to 3 :30. A near-by hospital was badly 
wrecked, and the one patient who had not yet been evacuated 
was taken through to St. Dizier by our car on Wednesday. The 
group of hospitals on the other side of the Maternity had one 
or two bombs in their grounds. 

"It was obvious that a ^poste de secours' at the Maternity was 
no longer suitable for mothers, as it was in such a dangerous 
position, and the Prefecture was very glad to help us to obtain 
a little enclosure in one of the big champagne caves under the 
Cote de Troyes, above which are eighteen metres of earth. Notice 
was given to the police, the Mairie, the Square and to the other 
caves that a poste de secours would be found there every night 
during the full moon, and all expressed themselves as apprecia- 



MEDICAL WORK 147 

tive of the arrangement. This means taking all outfit down about 
8 :30 p. M. and remaining there till between 3 and 4 a. m. 

Wednesday night a baby was born in the cave. The mother and 
baby were sent down to Mery the next day, and are doing ex- 
tremely well. On Thursday night a torpedo fell in the field at 
about twenty metres from the Maternity. Every window in the 
building save two was broken, and the tiles removed or broken 
from about half the roof. Dr. Heard, who was sleeping that night 
in her baraque, had a marvelous escape, and has fortunately 
not suffered in any way. 

"Fortunately all the valuable material had been brought away 
from the %renier,' and thanks to the loan of a motor-lorry by the 
American canteen, we were able to send another load to Mery 
at once. For a couple of days it was possible to remain in the 
damaged building, as the weather was fine; but when rain began 
it was obviously impossible, as there was no dry spot. The equipe 
has therefore removed into the children's home, where two wards 
with three beds for emergency work have been installed. Volun- 
teers from the staff at Mery take turns at present in coming up 
to Chalons, where the main work at present consists in trying to 
clear up the mess at the Maternity and save the remainder of the 
stock, and in arranging for the transport of patients to Mery. 
The cars are continually in demand for fetching sick and wounded 
into Chalons, as well as for the transport of our own mothers.'' 

As soon as the danger from shells had passed the return 
to Chalons was undertaken with much joy and the proces- 
sion of lorries carried mothers and babies back to the old 
headquarters. Here expectant mothers continued to come 
through the winter follovnng the armistice and at the time 
of my visit in January, 1919, about eleven hundred babies 
had been born in the Maternity, their mothers had found 
care, skill and love for their emergency and scores of little 
orphans had been carefuUy tended in the adjoining creche. 



148 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Letters that only Frenchwomen could write come in from 
past patients — letters written with a grace and delicate 
humor typical of the race. ^ * I know my Laurette is happy 
with you/' wrote one mother. *'One sees that all those 
children do very well, for your nurses are very gentle and 
very simple, too. They do not wear shoes with Louix XV 
heels, like the nurses at Rheims." Another mother wrote 
that she was very sorry her daughter was too young to enter 
the hospital and train to become a nurse like the other ladies 
there. The daughter was then six months old. 

^'Ma chere bonne Misspaille," wrote another, thoroughly 
Gallicizing Miss Pye's name. **I am sending you two 
words to tell you that I am sending you a little package 
with two dozen fresh eggs for the sick children. I am not 
rich, but I can send you some eggs." That was after 
baby Georges had gone home. Two months earlier, when 
the news of Georges' arrival had just reached the farm, his 
sister Zelpha wrote, "I am sending you a little letter to 
thank you for the care you have given Mamma. My little 
brothers and sisters thank you, too, for Mamma tells us she 
is very happy with you, and that she is better cared for with 
you than at home, because there is more to eat with you 
than here at home. (Signed) A little girl who sends love 
to you. Zelpha." 

The ** Maternity" has since been endowed by Friends, 
put under the care of an international committee and made, 
we hope, a permanent blessing for this section of the Mame 
Valley. There were two clinics for children connected 
with the medical center at Chalons, one at St. Remy and 
the other at Vitry. Dr. Heard, an American woman, who 
went to France under the Red Cross and who was on the 
staff of the Chalons ''Maternity" was, during the later 
period of the work, in charge of both these clinics. The 



MEDICAL WORK 149 

children's Home at St. Remy was in a large Chateau and 
was a splendid work of relief. 

A remarkable medical mission of a different type had its 
center at Samoens in the Haute Savoie, near the Italian and 
Swiss border, close to Chamonix. Here in the Hotel Belle- 
vue and its Annex Friends maintained a beautiful conval- 
escent home for broken refugees and rapatriees, i. e. for 
women and children. They were taken from crowded quar- 
ters in Paris or from the mass of rapatriees at Evian in a 
debilitated condition, unable to recover health, strength or 
spirits. In the glorious air of this Alpine home, with the 
best of care and in an atmosphere of love they underwent 
a great transformation. The place did not have the air of 
an institution at all, it was of the nature of a big family. 
Every one — housekeeper, nurses and teachers — all knew all 
the patients and all lived in happy fellowship. The girl 
refugees arrived there haggard, pale, hunted looking and 
very quickly were transformed into rosy, happy looking per- 
sons. No one asked about the tragedies of the past and the 
refugees themselves seldom referred to their experiences; 
they let the dead past lie buried and turned toward life 
once more. The changes in health and spirit were so strik- 
ing that it seemed almost like a center of miracles. Large 
bands of children came to Samoens also ; twenty-two came 
at one time from the baby institution at St. Remy. These 
babies lived a most happy life in the sun and air, fed 
plenteously upon the food their little natures needed. 
This institution was organized by Miss Rhys of England 
as Directress, assisted by Dr. Martin of America. Here 
a member of our American Unit, Dr. Marianna Taylor of 
St. Davids, Pennsylvania, had an important part in the 
work of this convalescent home from April, 1918, to October 
of the same year, when she went to be head of the Hospital 



150 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

at Bettancourt in the Marne, of which we shall hear later. 
A sanitarium for tuberculous patients was carried on by 
the Mission for some time at Entremont where many cases 
were brought hL^xx to normal health. A medical center was 
maintained for refugees at Dole, in Jura where one of the 
largest bands of our workers was engaged in building port- 
able houses and a clinical center for refugees was in opera- 
tion for a considerable period in Paris, connected with the 
Britannique. 

The most extensive hospital work, however, was carried 
on by the Mission in the Marne district and later in ''the 
Verdun area. ' ' A small hospital was opened at Sermaize by 
the E^iglish Friends soon after their work began. This was 
called the "Source Hospital,'' from the famous spring 
located at Sermaize. Though it was never well housed and 
had only limited quarters it did a great service for the dis- 
tressed region of country around it. Here Doctor Earp ren- 
dered a signal service. Here, too, Miss Evans and Miss 
Friend, two remarkable English nurses, did signal service. 
It was felt, however that there was a far greater medical 
and surgical work to be done in the neighborhood and when 
Dr. James A. Babbitt, who had gone over with the Haver- 
ford Unit, was free to undertake the task, he was asked to 
create a hospital out of the Chateau at Sermaize, on the 
opposite side of the destroyed town from "the Source," 
where our Marne headquarters were and where the other 
hospital already mentioned was situated. 

Dr. Babbitt arrived at the Chateau at the end of Novem- 
ber, 1917, and with a group of splendid helpers — such men 
as Ralston Thomas, Francis Sharpless, Hugh McKinstry, 
Weston Howland and Robert James — and with a very effi- 
cient house-keeper. Miss Kerr, he flung himself, with his 
usual energy, into the task of transforming the Chateau, 



^-^i. 



-f,^. 




1 1 



ei 



ff^ilr^"'il^ii 



MEDICAL WORK 151 

which had suffered somewhat from the invasion, into a thor- 
oughly modem hospital. The work went forward with 
great strides. Our expert electrician and general efficiency 
man, Leslie Heath, was called upon to install lights, which 
he did with marked success. Patients began to come almost 
before there were beds and as soon as there was an oper- 
ating table to use, Dr. Babbitt began his surgical work. 
The list of cases on which he operated is an amazing one. 
Very quickly the fame of this kindly, skillful doctor spread 
through the region and he found himself from the first an 
unspeakably busy man. His Ford car took him to out- 
lying villages within a very wide area, where he visited in- 
dividual patients or held village clinics, and when necessary 
the Chateau ambulance brought the cases in for treatment 
in that Hospital. 

The number of beds kept steadily increasing and so also 
did the number of nurses, who were under Sara Cunning- 
ham of Philadelphia, a most efficient head-nurse. The Hos- 
pital reached its highest capacity about the time of the 
Armistice when it had a hundred beds and about seventy- 
five patients. The total number of operations performed 
was about twelve hundred. Out of this number less than 
twenty died. These operations covered a very wide range 
of ills. There were over forty successful appendix opera- 
tions, over eighty for radical hernia, a number for goitre, 
several for mastoid and some for cataract, though these lat- 
ter were not always successful on account of the long 
neglected condition of the sufferer and the resulting degen- 
eration of the affected organs. The affection of the patients 
for Dr. Babbitt was very marked and before he had been 
long engaged in his work of mercy the appreciation in which 
he was held by the people of the district was touching to 
see. 



152 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

One sample of the numerous testimonials of loving ap- 
preciation may be given here. It is from the Cure of 
Brizeaux who was treated in the Chateau Hospital. He 
wrote as follows on his return home : 

"Dear Doctor: It is now a week since you kindly conveyed 
me home after a period of 47 days in your hospital, during which 
time I was surrounded by every care. I am afraid I am late in 
expressing my heartfelt gratitude and my affectionate thanks: I 
can do so from the depths of my heart, remembering your great 
care for me and the constant nursing attention given by the 
members of your staff — particularly those attached to the men's 
ward. 

"One leaves the hospitable roof of the 'Society of Christian 
Friends' (which so well bears out its name) with regret, even 
though one is anxious to get back home. It is good to be near 
you ! The Bishop of Verdun has been much touched by all your 
kindness to me and asks me to hand to you in his name the 
modest sum enclosed (100 francs) ; &c., 

"E. Claude." 

During the spring and summer of 1918 all the medical 
work of the Mission was under the care of a committee of 
three, consisting of Dr. Babbitt as chairman, Dr. Earp and 
Edith Pye. In October of that year Dr. Babbitt was ap- 
pointed head of the medical department with the oversight 
of all the hospital and clinical work of the Mission. This 
position of responsibility added considerably to the doctor's 
already heavy load, but he carried it successfully and made 
important reports to all the regular meetings of the Execu- 
tive Committee. In the near neighborhood of Sermaize 
there were two interesting medical centers, one at Charmont 
where was situated a home for elderly women (to be spoken 
of further in the chapter on Relief) and a station at Givry- 
en-Argonne where a trained nurse was stationed with a good 



MEDICAL WORK 153 

dispensary. At Bar-le-Duc an important medical center 
was maintained in connection with the Eelief station situa- 
ted there. About seven miles from Sermaize, in the Cha- 
teau of Bettancourt, a lar^e and successful hospital was 
maintained mainly for women and children, where Gertrude 
Pirn did pioneer work. Dr. Marianna Taylor of our Ameri- 
can group took charge of this hospital in November, 1918, 
and continued her excellent services at Bettancourt until 
the hospital closed in May, 1919. During this period Dr. 
Taylor attended to the medical cases in twenty outlying 
villages, which she usually visited by motorcycle. When 
Dr. Babbitt resigned from the Mission in January, 1919, to 
join the Red Cross Commission, appointed to carry relief 
to the Russian prisoners stranded in Germany, Dr. Taylor 
was selected to be his successor as head of the medical de- 
partment, which at that time was reorganizing the hospital 
work and the medical and surgical relief for the new dis- 
trict—the ''Verdun area," where our main work lay for 
the year 1919. At the same time Dr. Jesse Packer, who 
had been Dr. Babbitt's assistant at the Chateau Hospital, 
became his successor as head of the new hospital which took 
its place, the Chateau being re-occupied by its owner in 
January, 1919. This new hospital was at Brizeaux in the 
southern part of the district which I have called the "Ver- 
dun area. ' ' It was opened in the barracks which had for- 
merly been used for a hospital by the American army. 
Much of the furnishings and material which had been em- 
ployed at the Chateau were moved in lorries by members 
of the Mission to the new site, while Leslie Heath re-installed 
the electric light system, transported from Sermaize. 

Dr. Packer was soon joined by Dr. Stephens from Marion, 
Indiana, who was a very ready, skillful surgeon and who 
found, as Dr. Babbitt had done, plenty of opportunity to 



154 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

employ his skill. The new Brizeaux Hospital covered a 
very wide territory, reaching even as far as Rheims, minis- 
tering mainly to the great host of returning refugees, com- 
ing at length to their own villages, which our men had sup- 
plied with portable houses. By middle summer the hospital 
moved once more further north, this time to the central 
town of the area, Clermont-en-Argonne. The hospital 
was now installed in the spacious structure which had 
long served as a hospital for the region and which had 
formerly been maintained by Roman Catholic Sisters. 
The war had forced them away. During the period 
of American occupation and while the fighting was go- 
ing forward in the Argonne this ancient hospital had 
been used as headquarters of the American army. It 
was left, after the advance and transfer of the army, in 
a decidedly ''fallen" state. The rooms had been hastily 
stripped and they were strewn with rubbish and accumu- 
lated debris. The building was overrun with rats, as were 
all buildings of the region, but the possibilities of the place 
were at once obvious and the surroundings were by nature 
very beautiful. The workers in the Mission, already accus- 
tomed to do impossible tasks, undertook to cleanse this 
augean stable and to make it pure, clean, beautiful and fit 
for the troops of patients who were sure to come to it. 
They did their work well. No sign remained of the former 
desolation. The rats were eliminated. An atmosphere of 
home was soon to be given to the place and once more as in 
the past it was to become the scene of gentle, loving minis- 
tration. The lorries again moved the furnishings which 
had served the Chateau and Brizeaux and with some new 
material and supplies the Clermont Hospital was well 
equipped. It was intended from the beginning to have this 
a permanent hospital. The Committee proposed to fit it 



MEDICAL WORK 155 

out so that it could serve the entire area under our recon- 
struction, until our medical work was no longer needed and 
then they planned that it should be turned over with all the 
installed equipment to the Sisters. This has since been 
done. Both Dr. Packer and Dr. Stephens have returned to 
America with their splendid work accomplished and Cler- 
mont now has its fine Hospital — a source of love and healing, 
let us hope, for many years to come. Dr. Alethea J. Bolton 
was the head of the medical department of the Mission dur- 
ing the closing of the French work. 

An extensive amount of dental work was also carried on, 
especially during 1919. The long period of neglect had re- 
duced the health of both old and young to a serious condi- 
tion, entailing much suffering. Dr. Matteson, an English 
dentist, did an immense service in this field, going out in 
his oar over a wide area and helping thousands of persons. 
Dr. Maris and Dr. Dorland of the American Unit brought 
relief and comfort to a large number of people. Dr. Maris 
treated five hundred members of the Mission, over eight 
hundred French people and about two hundred German 
prisoners. No less was the value of the work which was 
supplied for the improvement of eyes. Spectacles and eye- 
glasses had often been lost or broken in the crisis of evacua- 
tion and many were without the ability to read. Our 
opticians carried on, again, during the year of 1919, a very 
important work in this line, which had been begun, as most 
good things had been, by the English Friends. Dr. Wild 
and Mr. Hoeppner held clinics and fitted glasses to a large 
number of patients who found great joy in recovering once 
more their power to read. 

This brief sketch gives little idea of the value of the 
medical and surgical work of the Mission during our period. 
It presents, and that very imperfectly, only the outside view. 



156 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

It does not and cannot give the vivid, inside appreciation 
of these years of ministration. What impressed the visitor 
most at any one of these centers of healing were the love 
and friendship so lavishly bestowed upon the patients and 
inmates. They had come in sorrow, with their burden of 
pain and affliction, and they found warm human hearts as 
well as skillful hands, and when they returned to their own 
again they had not only been healed but also " restored. '' 
Something of the Christ came to them as they lay on their 
beds in these hospitals and they found a new peace and 
power for their weary, distressed souls. 

Dr. Richard Cabot of Boston in a personal letter paid the 
following remarkable tribute to our workers : 

"We have hitched up our dispensary with the Quakers who are 
working in Paris and outside it for refugees in a spirit not 
equalled on the whole by any group I have seen out here. They 
work with their hands, build houses, help with the plowing, do 
plumbing work when plumbers are unobtainable, sleep in quarters 
that others find too hard, save money everywhere, and because 
they know what simple living is, are the best of case workers in 
city charities, never pauperizing, never offending. They work 
in the true religious spirit, asking no glory and no position, 
sharing the hardships they alleviate, and earning everywhere such 
gratitude from the French that the government has offered to 
turn over a whole department to them if they will undertake 
all the work of reconstruction there. Others working here in 
France have friends and enemies; the Friends have only friends, 
and I hear only praise of their work and can give only praise 
from what I have seen. . . . My, but they are refreshing folks. 
The English and American Quaker work together and with the 
Red Cross admirably." 



CHAPTER XII 

THE WORK OF THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 

The agricultural work was of many varieties according 
to the character and needs of the region in question. The 
central aim of course was to put the devastated land back 
into cultivation, to rescue the neglected areas from their 
small forest of weeds and to repair the havoc of trenches, 
shell holes and barbed wire entanglements. A large num- 
ber of our American workers were first-class farmers. They 
had the instinct and the skill to know what to do with land. 
They were confronted with unusual conditions, but they 
rose to meet them with fine fertility of mind and energy. 
Like most of the other work into which the men threw them- 
selves on their first arrival in France the agricultural work 
had been well organized and planned by the English 
Friends. This department was under the direction of Ed- 
ward West and its management throughout was able and 
forceful. The main section in which agricultural work was 
being carried on when our American boys joined the work 
was the Mame Valley, but almost at once the recovered area 
in the Somme was thrown open for cultivation. It had 
suffered terribly from the operations of the war and still 
more from the deliberate devastation during the famous 
''Hindenburg retreat.'' This had been a very fertile area 
and our workers were keen to bring it quickly back into 
effective cultivation and to make it produce enough not only 
for the support of its own returning population but for the 

157 



158 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

assistance of less favored parts of the country. The tragedy 
of its reconquest and the temporary defeat of the plans of 
the Mission in the Somme and Aisne will be told later. 

We must now turn to consider some of the types of farm- 
ing in La telle France. The most important thing to pro- 
duce was breadstuff, and our farming squads therefore al- 
ways endeavored to get as much land into wheat as possible. 
They were well supplied with tractors, with ''gang-plows" 
and with modem harrows for tractor service. With this 
equipment it was possible to prepare large areas of the soil 
and to put in a greater quantity of wheat than the peasants 
could have dreamed of doing by their more ancient methods. 
They were temperamentally very conservative and wedded 
to their own ways of farming, but they were quite willing to 
have our workers plow in the American way so long as the 
wheat was actually sowed and garnered. They often came 
out in large numbers — ^women, children and old men — to see 
the tractor carrying its fine row of plows through their soil. 
There were no fences or hedges between the peasants ' fields 
and therefore the men could plow very large sections at a 
stretch. It was like a return to the primitive way of com- 
munal life, before the god of boundaries became such a 
powerful divinity. There were other places where the 
farming followed more nearly the old pre-war methods. In 
some sections there were horses or at least cows available 
for plowing and harrowing and sometimes the " holdings'' 
of the peasants were individually tilled according to their 
own wishes and desires. 

The reaping at harvest time was another great agricul- 
tural event and this was for the most part done with modem 
reapers on a large scale. Then at a later period, usually 
during the winter months, the threshing was done, as will 
be told in due time. Many other crops besides wheat were 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 159 

raised, in fact the usual variety of vegetables was culti- 
vated and potatoes naturally received the proper amount of 
respect that now belongs to their no longer plebeian clan. 

There were centers for raising rabbits for distribution 
among the peasant families. There were poultry farms for 
producing eggs, chickens for food and chickens for distribu- 
tion. There were bee farms for supplying both honey and 
hives of bees. There were milk farms for providing pure 
milk for the children of the district. 

One of the interesting experiments carried on by the 
Mission was the maintenance of a large milk and poultry 
farm and center for loaning agricultural implements at 
Venault-les-Dames, a few miles from Sermaize, where a 
group of American boys showed their skill and devotion. 
The later work in the Verdun area will be mentioned when 
that extensive project is reviewed. Some glimpses of the 
work as it went on in the different areas will now be given. 
The agricultural work was done in the departments of 
Marne, Aisne, Somme, Meuse and Ardennes. 

One of our workers has given this picture of the work in 
Gruny, an important center in the area released by the 
German retreat made in 1917 : 

"Gruny is French through and through. The principal avenue 
is lined with Lombardy poplars until it reaches the village. The 
village itself is not large. One could barely see it from the rail- 
road if it were not for a small freight car standing on a siding. 
About a hundred and fifty tongues once chattered in its halls of 
fame and twice as many wooden shoes clattered down its muddy 
streets. But since the rough invader has swept these tiny 
homes of all that once did bloom there, and trampled down the 
work of centuries, hardly eighty souls have returned to brave 
their losses. Gardens gone, churches gone, chimneys gone, roofs 
gone. Were these piles of brick a village or are they a huge 



160 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

brickyard and for sale? One is tempted to ask this question 
on first arrival. No, each pile of bricks, each fallen house has 
woven around it a mystery, a romance of a century. See the 
stone in yonder gable. It is marked 1813. On either side is a 
newly-made wheel. Evidently a wheel-wright once lived there. 
Again, notice the plaster on the interior. It is made of clay 
and straw. The roof is either of tile or slate. A shell pene- 
trating the roof, and bursting, has sent the tile in all directions 

and toppled over the chimney. Thanks to the faithful, 

many of these chimneys stand straight again. Splintered sills 
are being renewed. Thus one finds need of masonry, carpentry, 
roofing and what not. It is a jolly good chance for all-round 
development." 

This is a picture of a typical French village as it appeared 
to the young Reconstruction worker in 1917. He saw before 
him the ruins of a strange, and to him, picturesque life, 
chiefly symbolized by broken ancient houses, and his work 
appeared plain before him, to rebuild the broken houses, or 
make substitutes. The background of the village life, as 
it had been in normal times, was usually unknown to him, 
and his thought was rather of restoration than of recon- 
struction. Yet reconstruction of a very thorough order was 
and is necessary. The French villages were not designed 
upon a plan so good that the new houses could be simply 
placed upon the sites of the old and all would be well. On 
the contrary, house was placed alongside house as closely 
as possible, with no idea of allowing for the free circulation 
of the sweet country air, or for the sense of liberty and 
peace that space around a house can give. 

This over-crowding of the villages was a relic of the days 
when it had been necessary to live close together for mutual 
protection. 

The need had long been past, but the natural conserva- 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 161 

tism of the peasantry clung to the old tradition of what a 
village should be like. 

"The grouping of the farm-houses into villages," says Arthur 
Walton, a member of the Friends Unit, "led to a variation in 
the value of land depending on its distance from the village. 
It became necessary therefore that the land be not all together 
but that a man might have a chance of owning some land near 
the village and some farther off. Add to this the tradition of 
egalite and the French law of inheritance, and the effect on the 
land was the deplorable morcellement. . . . 

"These two factors, the overcrowded, ill-planned, unsanitary 
farm villages, and the morcellement, are to-day the out-standing 
difficulties of the agricultural development of the country. 

"The French peasant has not kept up with the progress of other 
countries. He still clings to the old methods of his fathers. His 
lands are unsuited to growing large crops. He does not under- 
stand the machinery he is using and he knows little about scien- 
tific farming. His houses and barns are old-fashioned and 
cramped. And above all he does not understand the spirit of 
cooperation." 

The recognition of these factors broadened the conception 
of what Friends Reconstruction workers should be about. 
Not only first-aid in providing shelter for the homeless, and 
re-starting cultivation, but also, in good time, help in more 
progressive and modern farm, house, and village planning, 
sanitation, scientific farming and the use of machinery, and 
the principles and practice of co-operation. 

The agricultural relief undertaken by Friends provided 
immediate scope for a beginning under the last two heads. 

Beffore the end of 1917 there were one hundred and six- 
teen men, and twenty women American workers in France, 
which with the English workers already there made up a 
total of two hundred and thirteen men and ninety- five 
women in the Friends Reconstruction Unit of the American 



162 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Red Cross, or, as it was called in France, la Mission Anglo- 
Americaine de la Societe des Amis. 

These were scattered abroad among the various relief 
centers, the majority sprinkled through that region where 
"The green opaque waters of the Mame flow among the 
poplars between the rounded chalk hills ; where the villages 
and towns are strung like beads along the green thread of 
the river, which reflects their old bridges and picturesque 
towers; where on the hill-slopes are the vineyards and 
palaces of the wine kings, ^' while in the vaUey below haying 
and plowing, sowing and reaping, take place in their sea- 
son. Though now weeds, three years old, grew in the little 
fields, and over the hills came the thunder of distant guns. 

The accession of workers and means caused new villages 
to be opened up for relief, and on the 15th of October, 1917, 
the first sod was turned in the villages of Gruny and Golan- 
court and the agricultural work in the Somme district be- 
gan. One of the Relief workers wrote : 

"To view the vast spaces of untilled land that has fallen out 
of cultivation, covered with rank grass and weeds of all descrip- 
tion in boundless profusion is enough to bring despair to the most 
optimistic heart; but on the other hand, to take our villages one 
by one, to see a large field here or a smiall patch there now 
springing green with the promise of harvest where otherwise 
thistles would be reigning supreme, is to realize that, in spite 
of what still remains undone, our work has not been entirely in 



Besides other difficulties inherent in the work itself, the 
difficulty of getting horses suitable for plowing had to be 
met. Continuous plowing from day to day involved a 
heavy strain on the animals, which only really strong horses 
were capable of bearing satisfactorily. These were scarcely 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 163 

to be had except at a prohibitive price. Again, when some- 
thing in the shape of a horse was obtained, the next problem 
was ''to feed the brute." 

But one largely unforeseen difficulty, to those unfamiliar 
with the intimate habits and customs of the French, was 
the absence of the co-operative spirit among the people 
themselves. In a crisis, people are more apt to be ruled by 
their usual habits of thought and feeling than to develop 
new ones purposely for the occasion. The French peasant 
had carried individualism to an extreme for generations. 
Every cultivator and small farmer, however small his ag- 
gregate holdings might be, aimed to be entirely self-sufficing, 
with all requisite machinery, buildings and equipment, in 
spite of the obvious waste of this method. And the women, 
old men, and boys who returned to start the cultivation of 
the land again while their men were at the war, had no 
thoughts of co-operation in their minds. Each family 
thought of struggling with its own plot, with whatever tools 
it might individually own or obtain, neither seeking nor 
offering help among fellows in misfortune. 

But les Amis and stem necessity taught them differently ; 
showed them differently. Not easily, or without effort, but 
with much patience and persuasion they got the peasants to 
work together, lending help with large pieces of work, co- 
operating in the use of machinery. This was so obviously 
essential with the small amount of machinery and labor 
to go round that it was more possible than it would have 
been under ordinary conditions to get the peasants to co- 
operate, and the French Government, realizing that the 
shortage of both these essentials would last for some time 
after the war, most wisely encouraged the formation of 
permanent co-operative societies, or communal committees 
among' the farmers. One of these was in existence at Gruny 



164 SERV.ICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

when the Americans arrived, and at once asked their help 
in the development of five-hundred acres of land which they 
had agreed to farm jointly and share the proceeds. 

it is an indication of the spirit in which the re-cultivation 
of the land was undertaken that some of the owners of lands 
included in the five-hundred acres to be jointly farmed were 
prisoners in Germany, or mobilized men with no one in 
Gruny to represent them. It was arranged to have them 
participate in the returns from the land, after making 
proper allowance for those cultivators who might supply 
labor in addition to the labor which the Friends Unit 
donated. 

There still remained, of course, at Gruny and elsewhere, 
farmers who were obstinately conservative, and preferred to 
cling to their own little plots with as much independence of 
others as possible. These also the Friends were able to help, 
and in case of the women, to do their work for them. 

Later the French Government prepared legislation to the 
effect that any farmers forming themselves into a co-opera- 
tive society could borrow money from the Government at 
one per cent., thereby providing the first essential of all, 
adequate agricultural credit. Further, they undertook to 
sell machinery to communes, as opposed to individuals, at 
special rates. 

"All this will be rendered easier," writes a member of the 
Friends Mission, "by the fact that many of the old landmarks, 
which divided oE one little strip from another, and made it 
practically impossible to do anything on a large scale, have been 
destroyed, so that it may be possible to arrange the land on a 
more reasonable basis. But no government legislation, however 
intelligent, — and all modern agricultural legislation in France 
has been intelligence itself, — can ever be a really practical success, 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 165 

unless the conservatism and prejudice of the farmers can be 
removed. The farmers of these parts have never seen a motor- 
plow, and even a binder is of comparatively recent adoption, so 
it may be surmised that they will not always take kindly to new 
methods and new machinery." 

Friends inadvertently offered an invaluable service to the 
future of such progressive movements in rural France by 
their accustomed use of modem machinery, which they in- 
troduced and used for and alongside of the people. The 
motor-plow at Sermaize, for instance, once having proved 
its wonderful advantages, was in tremendous demand for 
miles around. The peasants were unwilling to see, but once 
having seen, ''seeing was believing." In those districts, 
and later in the other sections, the peasants were converted, 
and became eager for modern machinery in defiance of the 
shades of their fathers. 

Meanwhile, much of the old machinery, though, broken, 
was not broken past repair if missing parts could be ob- 
tained. As the quickest and cheapest way of helping the 
peasants to set to work again the Friends established repair 
shops for machinery in different centers. In their efforts 
to get missing parts from the large firms in Paris they were 
seized with a bright idea, and became agents for several of 
these firms in the district of the Meuse. This enabled them 
to supply necessary parts at reasonable prices to the 
farmers. 

Besides this, the French Army, when they found what 
work Friends were doing in repairing agricultural imple- 
ments, put at their disposal two large groups of salvaged 
broken machinery, from which they were often able to obtain 
necessary parts for the repair of almost obsolete machines. 
In one month, 360 machines were repaired for neighboring 



166 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

farmers, and so the visible forms of hope and self-respect 
placed in their hands. 

At Gruny the workshop for repairing of machines actu- 
all}^ succeeded, in the absence of a professional wheelwright, 
in restoring to active service two invalid hay-carts and four 
manure carts. 

While building, repairing and plowing were going on at 
some centers others were concentrating on threshing. The 
condition of the land varied a good deal according to its 
relation with the former war-front. Portions that had been 
immediately behind the French lines were more or less 
under cultivation, and had a harvest that had been wearily 
aynd unskilfully reaped and stacked by the boys, women and 
old men available. Portions that had been immediately be- 
hind the German lines were often barren and covered with 
weeds, except in some places where the Germans had planted 
crops for their own use, and had been forced to leave them 
behind for the French. 

In 1914 the good harvest had been ruined by the invasion. 

In 1915, after the initial disadvantages of beginning all 
over again in an already war-damaged country, great losses 
were sustained through the people having to make stacks 
for the first time, their barns having been burned. 

In 1916 the season was very wet; weeds had increased 
enormously, and the shortage of labor was extreme. More 
still, therefore, was lost. Also, it rained incessantly 
throughout the autumn, making plowing unusually difficult. 

In 1917 a wet spring, following an unusually severe frost, 
which killed much winter wheat, made it difficult to sow 
more at the right time, even had seeds, implements and 
labor been plentiful. It rained almost every day through 
the harvest season, making it harder even than it inevitably 
would have been to gather what scanty crops had laboriously 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 167 

been wrought upon to grow. Many fields were almost 
swamps, and the problem of getting the sodden grain 
threshed before the floods should entirely ruin it seemed 
insurmountable. 

The very elements seemed against the war-weary, heart- 
sick, harried French civilians, struggling with weak hands 
against such odds. 

Then what messengers of human love and good fellow- 
ship in that dreary landscape seemed the devoted, strong 
young men with the eight-pointed star. Their cheery for- 
eign ways, their noisy, broken French, braced up the sad 
villages like windy sunshine. 

They brought not only a will to serve, but threshing- 
machines; not only good-nature, but science and trained 
hands. 

Says one of them, writing from Sermaize: 

"During the winter months we have been almost entirely oc- 
cupied in threshing the crops, often very poor ones, which have 
been got in during the autumn. Ours are almost the only thresh- 
ing-machines in the district — consequently without the help of 
*les Amis' the nine hundred tons of grain which we have done 
must almost certainly to a large extent have been wasted. We 
know only too well the badly built sunken stacks, with their green 
tops, sometimes two or three years old; and the waste seems 
almost more pitiable when the harvest has been gathered with 
such infinite labor by old men, women and children. Our twelve 
machines, seven of which are driven by petrol motors and the 
other five by horse-power, have worked in thirty-three different 
villages. Mere figures, however, give very little idea of the extent 
of the work or of the number of people affected by it. Conditions 
in France, and particularly in the war zone, are so different from 
those at home. Nearly all the people in this district are farmers 
and of them seventy-five per cent, farm under twenty-five acres. 
Thus the number of people with whom we come into contact is 



168 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

much larger than would be expected, living as many of us have 
been doing, in caravans almost the whole winter, two together in 
a French village several miles away from our center at Sermaize, 
and depending entirely for our meals on the people for whom 
we happen to be working. It is a unique opportunity of getting 
to know the French peasants. Often there is no one in the 
villages who has ever before seen an Englishman, while an Ameri- 
can is indeed something to be pointed out and discussed. The 
work from daylight to dusk on a threshing-machine for five or 
six months is by no means light or pleasant. The barns, when 
there are any left, have a door at one end onlv ; and they are not 
merely dark, but dusty when a thresher, squeezed in between two 
walls of straw, fills up the only opening, and blows out a year's 
accumulation of dust and thistles from a particularly weedy 
crop of wheat or oats. 

"Yet there is probably not one who has lived this life in the 
villages who is not glad to have had the opportunity of doing so, 
and grateful for the friendships so formed. To have helped in 
some way to lessen the poverty and hardship caused by this 
fearful devastation and to increase the good feeling and amity 
between the nations is the work for which we are here. 

"It is due to a large extent to the knowledge of conditions so 
gained that during the spring and summer we are in a position to 
help those who need it most; first in plowing and sowing and 
later during the harvest. With a motor tractor and team of 
horses we have been steadily at work for several weeks, in one 
or two villages, taking payment in almost all cases to cover at 
any rate a portion of the cost of the work. 

"Some ten tons of seeds of all descriptions have been sold at 
cost price, as well as a large quantity of artificial manures, 
binder twine, etc.'' 

The value of the work may be estimated by the fact that 
the military authorities reported at the close of 1917 that 
the district around Sermaize had been unique in the war- 
zone as having been properly threshed. 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 169 

In 1918, with increased personnel, and better permits for 
moving from village to village, the Friends Unit threshed 
900 tons of grain as against 588 tons in 1917, and included 
for the first time seven fresh villages — Evres, Pretz, Som- 
maisne, Auzecourt, Rembercourt, Erize and Louppy le 
Petit. 

These traveling Quaker threshers lived with the peasants 
as they threshed the grain of each village community. 
They often slept in the same room with the peasant and his 
entire family. They were thus unable to have their win- 
dows open to the fresh air, for as Mark Twain once humor- 
ously remarked, the reason the air is so pure in France is 
that the peasants always sleep with their windows shut! 
This close and intimate life with the people gave the workers 
a great place in the hearts of the villagers and opened to 
them a rare chance to serve in a multitude of ways, not 
possible for those who administered relief in bulk and from 
office-centers. In spite of the fact that threshing was such 
hard menial work attended with so few comforts of life, the 
threshers always speak of this branch of service with real 
enthusiasm and regard it as a favored privilege. 

Two of our American boys arrived at such a town in the 
Mame with a threshing machine. One was engineer and 
the other fed the grain into the machine. There was a 
widow whose wheat they were to thresh first, and the only 
help she had was her old father and a one-legged son. She 
was a whole host in herself, but it was not enough workmen 
for even our energetic j^outh. Through the mayor they 
secured the assistance of two German prisoners. A sol- 
dier home for rest volunteered his aid, as did, also, two 
girls. 

The boys felt — what is always true in these retired places 
—that they, none of them, had much faith in outsiders, and 



170 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

they knew there was much speculation among them as to 
what good ''the foreigners" could do. 

When it was time to start the engine and show them what 
a foreigner could really do, the magneto failed to spark. 
This was at last remedied, and it started off with a glorious 
clatter, only to stop and start by jerks. This all gave ample 
opportunity for the disheartened, downtrodden populace to 
stand around making disparaging remarks. Our Quaker 
boys discovered water in the gasoline, but finally did get 
started. Then they threshed wheat — even with the kind of 
equipment necessary to use in this section — as the people 
here had never seen it done. 

Meanwhile, the good temper, the persistent effort, the un- 
paid work of the boys did not pass unnoticed. And the 
village prospered through the material help in their crops ; 
they learned to work together for mutual aid ; they opened 
their hearts to a thought of something worth while for them 
outside their village, even outside their own country ; they 
renewed their faith in each other ; and through these whom 
they learned to call ' ' The Friends, ' ' they ceased to pray to 
a God of Vengeance and saw Him as He truly is. Father 
of Loving Helpfulness. 

The peasants did not always take to the new ways of 
doing things as this account of plowing will show : 

' ' When we got out in the field to plow, some hundred and 
fifty people followed, and they sat up when the tank climbed 
a bank of thirty degrees. The field was marked out but the 
first furrow went very hard, so we stopped to take off the 
third plow, and even then found the clay soil too stiff to 
plow well up hill. ^Ca ne vaut pas quatre sous' was one 
encouraging remark. The tank replied with a back fire, 
soixante-quinze. After a great battle we finished that field 
and in drier weather and on lighter land we soon began to 






< ) 




£S^»5®iWf=;iS»i3«»Rit:S^S^sai.!t*!ft<>>'4RS«i^ 




Tractor Plowing* 



THE AGRICULTURAL DEPARTMENT 171 

prove its worth and overcome the prejudice caused by the 
bad start. Now we have a big list of plowing ahead, includ- 
ing two fields of twelve acres each, and we have already 
plowed over thirty acres, the greater part of which is sown 
and harrowed. 

"It is being driven now on the rolling hills overlooking 
the beautiful river valley, Grange-le-Compte, Clermont and 
the wonderful Argonne forest — the only blot on the horizon 
the bare hills of the front. At the present time there is only 
one man free to run it and the jolting and heat of it is 
enough to peel the skin off his face and give him a terrible 
thirst." 

The problem of re-stocking the farms with live-stock, and 
so increasing the food supply, was one that was harder to 
solve. It was in fact impossible to obtain many of the 
larger animals. But the food-value of the humble rabbit is 
not to be despised, neither is the creature expensive or diffi- 
cult to keep, though his charming furriness may make him 
harder for the tender-hearted owner to kill. Thousands of 
rabbits, therefore, were distributed by the Friends Unit in 
the districts of the Meuse and the Mame, and later, by the 
help of incubators, thousands of less-appealing chickens, 
besides some few goats, and several hundred sheep. Pro- 
fessional butchers were scarce, but hunger is a great hard- 
ener of hearts. 

Two or three bee-specialists among the members of the 
Unit also worked hard to build up a stock of bees for dis- 
tribution, to add to the resources of the more or less sugar- 
less French. 

On the signing of the armistice, the Friends ' work spread 
out through the country west of Verdun and plowing, har- 
rowing, and sowing were done for many villages in that 
region. In some cases this work was done before the return 



172 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAE TIME 

of the inhabitants, and at Brabant, the Cure, at the first 
service in his Church since 1914, gave thanks to God and the 
''Societe des Amis" for the plowed fields that greeted the 
inhabitants on their return. 

There were at this time 720 acres plowed by Friends, 
which would not have been done at all had they not done it. 

The work of the department was arranged by its monthly 
meeting of delegates. Most of the work, as it developed, 
came as a direct result of the initiative of the workers them- 
selves, as represented by their delegates at the monthly meet- 
ings. This system gave the members of each equipe free- 
dom and a sense of responsibility, which brought out their 
full efficiency, enthusiasm, and esprit de corps. 

It is a wonderful thing in war-time, even from the mili- 
tary point of view, to have some people on hand who have 
the time and the strength and the will to do the ordinary 
things upon which life depends. However valiantly the 
soldiers may drive the invader from the country, and so 
claim to defend the lives of the civilian population, (i. e. 
nowadays, the old men, women and children) they may re- 
turn to find them dying of starvation in the spoiled and 
devastated crop-lands, or mentally deranged by the long de- 
spairing struggle for mere life against overwhelming odds. 

But perhaps if we grew so humane and intelligent as to 
tell off a sufficient number of people with the requisite phys- 
ical, mental and spiritual qualities, to undertake adequately 
the reconstruction of a country on the very heels of war, and 
to take proper care of the civilian population on account 
of which so many men were dying and killing, we should 
be too humane and intelligent to indulge in the grotesque 
and self -contradictory practice of war any more. 



CHAPTER XIII 

EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 BEFORE THE GERMAN ADVANCE 

An unexpected and discouraging set-back to the work of 
the new recruits to reconstruction work was experienced in 
the spring of 1918. They were just beginning to see some 
results of their labors in building, relief, agriculture, and 
medical work, when the tide of war turned, and the Ger- 
mans started the big push which was their dying, convulsive 
effort. "Where they passed, the reconstruction work — the 
mended tools, the little wooden maisons demontahles, the 
patched up houses, all the little glad signs of returning 
civilization, were wiped out, and the former desolation re- 
stored in more than its former despair. 

When the German offensive began on March 21st, seventy 
houses which it had taken the construction camp at Dole 
months to make, were destroyed. Sixty men who were at 
work in five centers, some of them barely ^yq miles from 
the lines, were ordered to evacuate. Owing to the condi- 
tions under which the evacuation had to be carried out, the 
need of first helping all the peasants possible in their va- 
rious difficulties, nearly all the tools were left behind, and 
large parts of the personal and domestic equipment of the 
Friends Unit were lost. The crowded condition of the 
roads, jammed with fleeing refugees and long trains of 
army camions, made necessary the abandonment of one of 
the tractors, two ^* caravans" and some agricultural 
machinery. 

173 



174 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

The equipe at Foreste, closest to the German lines was 
forced to evacuate on the first day of the offensive, and in 
rapid succession those at Ham, Golancourt, Esmery-Hallon 
and Gruny found themselves under the same necessity. 
Some of the men were under fire, but there were no casual- 
ties at this time. The chief danger to health afterwards was 
excessive fatigue, owing to the prolonged and unceasing 
demands made upon the mental, spiritual, and physical 
resources of the Friends, advising the bewildered peasants, 
carrying the bundles of the weak, seeking lost children, aid- 
ing with recalcitrant cows, sharing their scanty stores of 
food with the hungry, cheering people on the road, and then 
working to make arrangements for their comfort when they 
had reached a place of safety. It was a particularly strenu- 
ous interval, full of ordinary kindnesses, unheroic common- 
place acts of commonsense and charity, not noticeable, noth- 
ing to boast about afterwards, but a very literal interpreta- 
tion of the recommendation in the New Testament about be- 
ing ''least of all and servant of all.*' The French peasants 
had learnt to regard les Amis as friends — people to be ap- 
pealed to, people who would do things for them. 

As for the feeling of les Amis, one of them, writing a 
week after the evacuations, when depression at the wasted 
work, the destroyed effort, might have been expected to be 
the prevailing -mood, says : 

"I could not think of the loss of our material work . . . but 
only of the tremendous gain in friendship and good-will among 
& people to whom we cannot even yet speak plainly. There is 
one thought ingTained in every one of us, and that is that as 
soon as we can, we must go b^^ck and help them set their homes 
in order and begin life anew. If the people in America who are 
back of us will give us half a chance, we can, I think, accomplish 
thrice the good that we have in the past." 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 175 

The stories of this little tragic interval are full of pictures 
of a war-ridden country, and of the kind of spontaneous, 
sensible action which the Friends ' organization made it pos- 
sible for individuals to render in the moment of need. 

Haa'old F. Trew writes: 

"From the edge of the forest one looks out across the plain to 
the ruined city of Rheims, and the gray towers of its cathedral. 
Southward from the town runs the highway to Epernay, — across 
the plain, up the hillside, through the forest and down again as it 
winds through the vineyards of the Marne. To-day a strange 
caravan is passing along it. Farm-carts piled high with sacks, 
bedding and furniture; a wrinkled old woman sitting on one, 
a farmer and his children surrounding it; here a herd of cat- 
tle or a shepherd with his gray drove of sheep raising a cloud 
of dust as it passes; men, women and children pushing trucks 
and perambulators filled with babies and packages, — an entre- 
preneur des transports obliged to-day to undertake his own re- 
moval. Everything with wheels capable of being moved is moved 
southward, through the forest and the vineyards to the town, 
beyond it to the towers of Montmort and the poplar-filled valleys 
beyond. The highway becomes more crowded as they pass, and 
every road from the west or northwest brings a tributary stream 
running southward, always southward, while to the north where 
the guns sound, passes another cavalcade, of many nations and 
tribes, white with the dust of the roads. 

"It is evening, and the caravan has turned aside from the high- 
way into the green fields among the poplars. Tarpaulins are 
spread across two carts placed near together, or over a rough 
framework of branches; horses and cattle graze near by; the old 
village shepherd guards his gray sheep among the red poppies, 
and the blue smoke of camp fires rises up through the trees 
while the evening meal is prepared, and the bright red duvets 
laid out on the green grass between the carts. 

"Northwestwards runs the road to X. . . . At the crossways, — 
where emerging from the forest, one looks down to the river. 



176 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

along whose banks, and among the trees beside it, are the unseen 
opposing forces, — a shell has fallen, tearing up the stones, and 
making passage difficult. Below and to the right is a little 
village, and the car, running down the hillside, is soon between 
the houses; but for a few soldiers placing telephone wires, or a 
passing cavalier, the place is deserted. Two or three inhabitants 
had indeed been seen that morning, but a search in the dark 
cellars, and in the rooms where tables are still spread with the 
remains of an unfinished meal, and on whose hearths the fires 
are burnt out, reveals no one. Outside not a soul is to be found. 
Stay, here is an old woman in her garden. Would she go in the 
car over the hill to safety"? No, she could not leave; her garden 
must be attended to, there were her rabbits and cows to feed, — 
she must stay to look after her children's interests; and anyhow, 
she was ^assez vieille pour faire une morte.' Perhaps, among all 
the sad things of war these old people are the saddest of all. If 
they are taken from possible death they are torn too from all 
that life holds dear for them, — the farm where they had lived in 
childhood, and where their sons and grandsons had been born, 
the fields they had tilled, the church they had prayed in. — 'J'aime 
mieux mourir id que sur les chemins,' And so she had to be left. 
One man only can be found to return in the car. At the cross- 
ways several more shells have fallen, one falls upon it when the 
car has passed, and another in the edge of the wood fifty yards 
ahead, throwing brown earth over the road. 

"Here are two women walking back towards their village to 
fetch clothing. Pointing towards a group of houses a mile or so 
away, they ask that the car may take them there: besides the 
packages there are old and sick people who wish to leave. So 
the car makes towards the houses. ... In the village there seems 
no sign of life, no sound but the scream of shells overhead, the 
echo of the guns across the woods. The women in the car point 
to a cellar door. There, they say, is a woman with her baby, 
but three days old, who wants to leave the village. Down in the 
darkness, in the damp and cold, but in safety from the shells, 
lie the mother and her new-born babe. The mattress is taken out 



EVAOUATIONS- IN SPRING 1918 177 

and laid in the car, the mother and child carried out of the cellar 
and placed upon it. Little groups have now gathered in the 
village street around the car. There is not room for all who wish 
to go. Several old people with bundles of clothing hurriedly 
gathered together find places in the car, leave is taken and tears 
shed, the ear speeds up the hill and through the wood again. 

"Two old people, one of them a cripple, to be brought from the 

cellars of the distillery at Y ." So runs the message handed 

to us. As night falls the car passes through the forest towards 
the valley of the Mame. The report of the guns shakes the earth 
and echoes across the woods. ... At the edge of the forest, the 
road is pitted with shell-holes, torn branches of trees lie across 
it, the dark brown earth is scattered everjrwhere. Across the 
valley in the dusk one can see the opposing line of hills; below, 
between the trees, the gleam of the river, here and there the silver 
light of a flare. The car runs quietly down to the town. A spell 
seems to have fallen upon the place, no sound or movement is 
there, it is a city of the dead. Knocking on the doors brings no 
response; we enter the rooms; they are deserted. Further along 
broken stones and tiles lie about the streets, shattered fragments 
of glass reflect the light of the stars. The road leading to the 
bridge head is hidden by camouflage. Beyond it is a sentry who 
makes his challenge and leads us to the officers' quarters. Our 
mission told, we are taken to the distillery cellars. Here, in the 
great vaults hewn from the chalk in the depths of the earth, lit 
now by the dim light of candles and lamps, mattresses are laid 
out, and upon them, not two persons only but twenty-five. Some 
are already awake, others are awakened — eager to leave the fated 
town. The limit of baggage which can be carried is a deterrent, 
and the selection of the right articles to be taken is a lengthy 
process. Lame and sick people are carried up the interminable 
steps to the open air, the first load made up, and the hillside 
climbed once more. 

"Past the cross-roads one breathes again, but three journeys in- 
stead of one must be made; the distance from the base is long, 
and the night is short. . . . 



178 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

"As the car climbs the hillside with its last load, the moon rises 
red between the dark trees, dawn follows, and the mist among 
the poplars vanishes away. . . . 

"Rough peasants are these farmers, whose fair children seem to 
owe but little to their parents, but to be rather children of nature, 
a part of the field from which they have been torn. Here is one 
little girl with complexion sallow as the fields from which the 
hay is carried, the curves of her face recalling the rounded chalk 
uplands, her fair hair stirred by the breeze as the wind stirs the 
corn, her eyes gray and deep as the waters of the Marne into which 
they have so often gazed. . . ." 

Ernest Brown's account is vivid and worthy of a place 
in the story of disaster and of bravery: 

"I will have to condense the account of recent happenings both 
because of the censorship and for lack of time to write more 

fully. 

"To begin with, on the morning that the great offensive started 
the guns commenced to roar at about 4 :30 a. m. so that we could 
hardly sleep and soon we could hear the shells whistling by and 
bursting near the station. We concluded it would be a good 
hunch to get up and see what was doing. We did so, some of 
the fellows wen*t to their work and we chauffeurs worked on our 
cars. About 10 a. m. word came in that the Germans were ad- 
vancing and that villages up the line had orders to evacuate by 
train. We went out to assist if we could and Tritz' was slinging 
shells in every little while. 

"After the civilians were all on the train which was waiting 
for them, we went on out to evacuate our own boys who were 
still further toward the front. It was just about as hot territory 
as I ever want to be in, with shells exploding along the sides 
of the roads and the allied artillery right over the other side 
of a big hill from where we were, making a terrible noise. The 
wounded were coming in by the hundreds in ambulances and 
trains. The following morning we were awakened at 5 :30 by the 
Town Crier going around with a bell and tellmg all civilians to 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 179 

leave the town by either the 7 :30 a. m. or 10 a. m. train. I dressed 
at once and got right busy with the motor truck hauling people 
and baggage to the station. All of our crowd left on the 10 
o'clock train except Sid Brown, our other chauffeur, Bell, Preston, 
Greist, Hinshaw, Miss Glancy and myself. We started out with 
the two cars going different ways toward Paris. I drove to a 
town about twelve miles away where there was an American Red 
Cross Officer who asked us to stay and help in a number of vil- 
lages which he knew were going to be evacuated. Preston, Greist 
and myself stayed and helped to evacuate and settle the refugees 
in a large college building while the Germans were still coming 
on. 

"That night about 11:45 we were through with helping the 
people and then started back to the town where our headquarters 
had been, to bring out our food stores. I will never forget that 
ride as long as I live. It was moonlight with a thick fog covering 
the ground. We drove twelve miles and at about 1 :15 a. m. we 
crossed the bridge into the town and then stopped to listen. There 
was not a sound except the occasional bark of a machine gun. 
It seemed strange that there was no more noise but we went on 
into the town, loaded up our supplies and got ready to pull out 
about 3 a. m. We met some British outpost sentries who said they 
didn't know where the Germans were, but that they were expect- 
ing them into the town before long. We thought we might as well 
leave as by now the machine guns seemed to be shooting pretty 
lively. Just before we pulled out we met four Tommies' wheeling 
a boy on a stretcher who had machine-gun bullets in his thigh and 
arm and was bleeding badly. They stopped us and asked us to 
take him on to a hospital. As the large hospital near by had been 
cleared out, the nearest one was about nine miles away, so we put 
him on top of the load with two of the fellows that were with 
him. The fog was getting thicker but we could see about fifty 
feet ahead. We could, of course, have no lights and started on 
slowly. The first thing I knew I had run my left wheel into a 
large shell hole big enough to bury a three ton truck in, but for- 
tunately by a quick jerk, I ran my right wheel up on a bank 



180 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

and got safely around the place. It was then fairly easy driving 
for awhile. We passed about five miles of retreating horse artil- 
lery. Ahead of the artillery came more equipment, tractors and 
what not and it took some two and a half to three hours to go a 
distance of perhaps twenty kilometers. We anived at our repair 
group about 4 to 6 a. m. I do not know the exact time as all our 
watches had stopped. We found our fellows all ready to pull out 
with their stuff loaded into the carts of our agricultural depart- 
ment. I immediately unloaded the food stores and used the car 
to take out all the people who wished to be evacuated, but some 
of them preferred to stay and take their chances. As the village 
was small and the people few, I soon finished and went back to 
the Red Cross warehouse, packing up my food stores again en 
route. 

"The following day was spent in hauling mattresses for the 
refugees who had come from the villages near by. About noon 
of the next day they sent me out to help evacuate a village ten 
miles away to the east telling me that I would be back that night 
very late, or at least the next day before noon. As a result, I 
left everything that I owned at the warehouse, even leaving my 
uniform coat and wearing a leather one, as I knew there would 
be a lot of work to do and I wanted to keep it clean. They kept 
me four days on that job, however, and by that time the Germans 
had occupied the town I had left. I lost, therefore, almost all 
my clothing, my mandolin, my gold watch, $40.00 in American 
Express Company checks and some rather valuable tools belong- 
ing to the Motor Department. The boys that were there saved 
my ^cello, fur coat and suit case, but the last mentioned contained 
little of value. 

"At the next village to which we were moved we stayed two 
days with the guns getting heavier all the time until we had got 
all the people out and most of the food stores. I had been sleep- 
ing in a cellar, in my motor truck, in the back of a Ford car and 
in various other places and did not take off my clothes, except 
my shoes, for nearly a week. On the third morning at this village 
they routed us out at about 3 a. m., saying that the Boche had 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 181 

launched a gas attack and that we had better leave. This we 
did with our gas masks all ready for an emergency, but nothing 
startling happened. 

"Again we were transferred to another evacuation center and 
by this time Hainer Hinshaw and I with the ^Garner' car were 
the only ones of the 'Mission des Amis' left in that particular 
district. From there I was sent to a large town directly on the 
road to Paris about eight or nine miles from where the Germans 
were and at this place I had an opportimity to tune up my car, 
scrape out the carbon, etc. This town or rather city had been 
completely evacuated and the Red Cross had a whole hotel turned 
over to them and there I slept in a real bed. It was some ex- 
perience to feel a bed under you after sleeping in all kinds of 
places. 'Fritz' soon commenced to shell this place, particularly 
the railroad and we went to bed in the cellar tiie second night. 
After being there about three days some of our crowd blew in 
with the 'White' car and then we all pulled out for Beauvais 
where I am located at this writing with the American Red Cross 
directed by a Mr. Jackson who is an exceedingly nice and efficient 
man. Our work now consists in meeting trains, caring for 
refugees that come in from the villages up the line and sending 
them on down to the south of France as soon as we can get 
enough to make up a train load. We have sent out two trains 
since I have been here, one of 600 and one of 800 people, but 
the stream is lessening now and unless the Germans come on 
farther we will be out of a job here soon. 

"It is a heartrending sight to see these people driven out with 
just what stuff they can carry with them. I have taken them out 
of their homes with the ear-splitting guns all around, packed their 
stuff and moved them away. I have walked through an entire 
city the size of West Chester, Penn., or larger, all intact but with 
not a single civilian in it. It is sad, sad business and I for one 
will rejoice when it is all over. Not for my own sake, but for 
the thousands of miserable people we have helped to move out of 
war's pathway during the past two weeks. 

"I thank goodness that I am somewhat of an optimist.'^ 



182 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Carleton MacDowell writes from Gruny: 

" We'd not finished dinner on March 22nd (after two days 
of constantly approaching bombardment) when Walls, from Gol- 
ancourt, appeared at the door. All the Golaneourt and Esmery- 
Hallon men were on foot or wheel or in carts. . . . I've been 
washing dishes for some of the men who may come in at any 
time. Marshall and Wray have been peeling potatoes to fry 
for them. . . . 

"The rest of the evening seems now as one confused whirl; 
constant chasing back and forth between the dining-room and 
kitchen — people eating at the tables — always eating — new faces 
always. Then the tramping about in the grenier, where our 
refugee comrades were finding their beds. . . . Each group of 
fellows brought more stories, and each new set of stories brought 
the Germans nearer, and made the outlook more gloomy. It was 
eleven when Kit and I finally started up to Vigne Verte to pack. 
The great soup-kettle filled with oatmeal all cooked was in the 
oven. 

"2 A. M. Kit and I turned in for some rest — ^hard work while 
a retreat was in progress, while the camions were snorting and 
jockeying for positions outside, the air restless with planes — 
French and Boche too, with occasional bombs and machine-guns. 
At four Joe came in. We were to get out as soon as possible. 
Things looked black. . . . 

"Ernest Brown appeared about dawn with a load of stores 
saved from Ham. They had begun to eat breakfast when I 
arrived at the house; some were standing as they gulped down 

their oatmeal. M had opened up the treasures of his stock 

— dates, figs, nuts, apples, cheese. We ate and stuffed pockets 
and knapsacks. The food supplies from Ham were unloaded 
in the yard, so that the camion could be used to help evacuate 
some of the neighbors. K. went all round the village telling 
everybody of the chance to be evacuated at once. . . . 

"Down along the road through the fields we swung towards 
Roye en route for Montdidier. Wheat was just breaking through 




% 




A Group of Refugees 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 183 

— some of it in stocky plants of rich green; the smooth brown 
soil was all planted; newly-plowed patches in deep furrows 
were made almost purple-brown by the steam that the sun was 
wooing out of the frost. The sparkle of the day was elating. 
One could not help feeling the wine of spring. 

"We were passed by E., with a camion filled with Gruny 

people; Madame D , Madame F , — I didn't recognize all 

of the people, they looked so unnatural dressed in coats and 
hats. We waved — but a heartsick farewell it was. They were 
gone in a moment. . . . And all the time the skylarks were do- 
ing as only they know how; their exaltation and jubilation 
would win your heart and hold your attention for a moment, 
then the pangs of the hour would sweep back with more over- 
coming realization. . . . 

"Here was a group of two women and several girls hopelessly 
gazing at the broken tongue of their two-wheel cart. The situa- 
tion looked very difficult at first, but by strings and a strap the 
broken tongue was secured in place, and a redistribution of the 
weight of the luggage finished the job. We pulled it along a 
little way to test its running, and then marched on ahead search- 
ing for other service. . . . Almost eveiy one was too busy to be 
very unhappy, too occupied with wheeling or pushing or trudg- 
ing or just holding on, to mourn. Wheel-barrows were heaped 
head-high; carts held more above the usual high sides than be- 
tween them, and sometimes a smaller cart trailed on behind. 
Mother, in a weirdly adorned hat, was enthroned on one such 
trailer; another cart was so full that the only place for Madame 
was a short projection beyond the tailboard, and there she clung. 
There were people who had left comfortable homes and had 
several carts. We saw many a keg of wine; we saw cases of 
champagne. There were Mesdames all alone with nothing to 
carry but the leading rope of a cow — or a baby-carriage. One 
woman was sitting on the bank, her face buried in her hands, a 
handkerchief thrown over her head — just she and the baby. . . . 

"There people were retracing their steps ; once before they had 
turned their backs on their homes. . . . Was it worth while to 



184 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

have made the new start *? Would it have been better to have 
remained refugees than to suffer the intensity of the war again t 
Easter came to Gruny with war and destruction. As Easter 
dawns it clearly dawns upon us that our hopes — their hopes — - 
have been crushed; that our work has even now been undone, 
and how quickly. Yet the best of it remains, the best which 
was the inner purpose of it all." 

Parvin M. Russell writes from a relief group : 

"Somewhere southeast of Chateau-Thierry and southwest of 
Epernay, a location which was pretty well chosen as a relief 
center, since quite a stream of refugee families poured through 
on their way out of the immediate path of the Germans. There 
was a temporary canteen serving soup and coffee all day long, 
with bread and beans, sometimes separate, sometimes in the soup, 
but it was a welcome spot for the weary folk who trudged by 
with wagons and wheelbarrows piled high with their house- 
hold affairs. Our three or four autos did good service bringing 
old or crippled people out of the towns close up behind the 
new lines. . . . One of the boys from the Source and I had 
an old Renault car with a van body, which served nicely for 
both ordinary and ambulance work. . . . We did find one case 
that hardly bears the telling, but it was our job to remove a 
sick woman from a small town where practically no civilians re- 
mained; all had sought safety, leaving this woman absolutely 
alone in bed, unable to get out of bed to prepare her own meals. 
The soldiers in the other houses had their hands full with their 
own affairs and so she was practically marooned. The military 
had telegraphed us to come and get her, it is true, but when we 
arrived, the four poilu stretcher-bearers who volunteered to help 
put her in the auto, one by one sought the fresh air of the front 
yard, apparently somewhat concerned about the lunch they had re- 
cently had (and didn't care to lose). Finally one of them nerved 
himself to the task and with a handkerchief for a gasmask, I went 
in to see if I could help him; but such a condition of filth and 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 185 

helplessness I have never seen. We couldn't put her on a stretcher 
because of the pain of movmg her infected and terribly swollen 
leg ; the old hrancardiers would not touch her ; so it ended by put- 
ting her whole bed into the auto and taking her forty-five miles to 
the hospital. . . . The next day, having to go to the same hospital 
with another load, I inquired about the poor woman, and was told 
that she was really doing nicely. . . . 

"It was pleasing, too, throughout the whole little period of 
service in that region, to have the various military authorities 
express their appreciation of the work 'Les Amis' were doing. 
As one captain of about forty-five years said to me, 'It makes it 
easier for these poor folks to bear with leaving home, since your 
people look after them and show kindness,' and I believe it did 
help them to forget something of the bitterness of their lot. 
One old lady was able to get something of a thrill out of the fact 
that it was her first ride in an automobile. And certainly the 
hot soup and coffee at the canteen were always a surprise and 
delight to them. . . . Another definite service our canteen did 
was to distribiite information to refugee farmers in regard to 
taking up their abode on abandoned farms, of which there were 
a large number available ; also directing their attention to various 
bureaus which could place them at work on under-cultivated farms. 
All this tended at once to point out some definite objective, and 
brought a ray of hope back to many a man who might have 
gone on in a sort of discouraged fashion and lost a good chance 
to start for himself again. . . . 

"In the house just beside our canteen lived a tiny little sunny- 
haired girl named Audree, who used to play around, much in- 
terested in all that was going on. She was a little ball of sun- 
shine, and was actually kept clean by a very careful mother, so 
that we all nearly spoiled her. But the last day, as two of us 
were finally closing up the place and packing the last pan into 
the auto, little Audree was out to see it all, and when we said 
good-bye I took a kiss 4n my fingers' so to speak, and placed it 
on her tiny forehead. It surprised her for a minute (it was evi- 



186 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

dently a new way to be kissed) but she looked up and quick as 
a bird kissed her own little fingers and reached up to put the 
kiss on my furrowed brow." 

And Richard Clements casts light from another angle 
from Montdidier : 

"Two of us who had ridden (on bicycles) ahead of the rest of 
our party went at once to the sous-prefecture to ask if the 
members of our Mission could in any way assist the civil authori- 
ties in the work of feeding and lodging the emigres who were 
arriving. We were informed that the authorities had received 
no news of the evacuation of several places we mentioned, and 
that no arrangement had been made to feed or lodge the people 
coming into the town. In company with a secretary from the 
sous-prefet's office, we next called upon Monsieur le Maire, who 
was equally surprised to learn that five or six hundred emigres 
were en route for Montdidier. We held a hurried consultation to- 
gether, and agreed upon a few simple things that had to be done 
at once. 

"B. G. was sent off post-haste on a bicycle- to tell the people on 
the road to come at once upon arrival to the town square. The 
Maire telephoned the military authorities for a supply of bread, 
to be distributed immediately to the emigres. 

"In the meantime a group of American ladies, members of the 
Red Cross, had arrived on the scene. They secured the use 
of a small room in a house near the Place, and in the course of 
the day were able to provide crowds of hungry people with 
bread and hot coffee. 

"Late in the same evening, the use of the Ecole Maternelle in 
a street adjacent to the Place was secured as a lodging house for 
those, and they were many, who had failed to obtain accommo- 
dation elsewhere. The lodgers brought their own bedding, placed 
it on the floor in one of the schoolrooms, and settled down to 
sleep until morning. 

"Next day the feeding center was transferred to this building, 
and a large quantity of food was prepared in a hastily improvised 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 187 

kitchen during Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Soup, coffee, 
chocolate, bread, meat and fruit were distributed to the people 
as they arrived, and also to those who passed through Montdidier 
railway station by train. In the course of three days, the small 
group of English and American workers at Montdidier were able 
to provide some little refreshment for two or three thousand 
people." 

The elasticity of the Friends' organization, and their 
capacity for spontaneous service are well-exemplified by the 
mention in this letter of 

''Our Friend, Eric Boston, who during our stay at Montdidier 
had done splendid work on behalf of the most sorely-tried people, 
accompanied the emigres on one of the trains that were ministered 
to, in order to render the emigres what service he could en route 
and to help to make some provision for them at the end of their 
journey," at a destination inconnue. 

Montdidier itself, however, was only a temporary refuge. 

^ "On Tuesday three of our workers were able to evacuate the 
sick and infirm people from the Hospice of Montdidier. These 
unfortunate sufferers were carried from their beds, placed on 
board the 'White' camionette, and then taken to the railway 
station, about a mile and a half away. A long, closed goods 
wagon had been brushed out and converted into a temporary 
traveling hospital ward, with beds placed upon the floor for the 
most serious cases. Six or seven women, all of them seriously 
ill, and two of them in a dying condition, were placed on these 
beds in charge of two nuns from the Hospice. . . . 

"About eight o'clock on Tuesday evening we had been advised 
to leave Montdidier as soon as possible, as it was thought to be 
dangerous to remain any longer. The townspeople were leaving 
in streams. . . . 

"Two of us set out for Amiens at two o'clock on Wednesday 
morning. Montdidier seemed like a town of the dead. The 



188 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

houses were deserted, the shops closed, and the streets had become 
strangely silent, only here and there one saw an odd civilian, or 
a hurrying group of soldiers. The town lay waiting for its 
enemies. Montdidier had been evacuated." 

Says another writer: 

"Experience has proven that the people will go back to the 
Somme at the earliest possible moment, and that they will rejoice 
at our return. We shall be needed more than before. It will 
mean much to the people, and more to us who have worked with 
them in their broken homes before the drive. And it will mean 
much to the whole Society which we represent. The people 
want us and need us. Our duty is plain. 'Back to the Somme' 
as soon as the way opens is our slogan." 

When this disaster was envisaged by the Mission, it be- 
came evident that one of the first things to be done was to 
house as many refugee families as possible and to take them 
where no more "drives" by great armies would smash 
through their homes. Our house-building shops turned to 
the task of making houses for refugees in near-by towns. 
Parks were furnished in some of the cities within easy reach 
of the house factories in which we were given permission to 
build temporary cites for these desolate and homeless 
sufferers. 

One of the most interesting of these refugee cites was the 
one in the great park of Besaneon where a long winding 
park-road was lined on both sides with the pretty brown 
houses topped with tile roof. A touching experience hap- 
pened to me as I went down this road examining the houses 
of the cite about New Years of 1919. The little children 
gazing out of the windows saw me going by, dressed in the 
uniform of the Friends' Mission. They recognized that it 



EVACUATIONS IN SPRING 1918 189 

was some one connected with the kind men who built their 
homes. 

In a happy throng they rushed out, circled and danced 
around me and shouted with unrestrained joy. I felt like 
a father returning to his enthusiastic children after a long 
absence. It revealed the real inner significance of the labor 
of love. 

Other similar cites were built at Dole along the river 
front, at Troyes and at Monceau-les-Mines. The way our 
men met the disaster of ''the great drive" is finely shown in 
the closing word^ of Carleton MacDowell 's letter : 

"When the end came and the material works were lost, the 
best of all remained — that best which was the inner purpose of 
it all. Neighborliness, friendship, kindliness, sympathy — these 
are made of stuff which no chemistry of war can crush, any more 
than death can end the influence of a man's personality. 

"The never-dying spirit of a man carried on and on, in ever 
broadening circles in the lives of others — this is immortality. 
We face half a year's work torn to pieces. Yet I believe the 
influence of our work will live on in the lives of our neighbors, 
in our own lives. The final sacrifice will deepen its effect. For 
does not Christianity itself have at its heart this triumph of 
spiritual over material!" 



CHAPTER XIV 

RELIEF WORK AND OTHER FORMS OF SERVICE 

** Relief" was obviously one of the most pressing needs, 
as the havoc and devastation presented themselves on every 
hand to our workers. The need for relief in general was of 
course manifest everywhere, but there were certain specific 
types of relief which made an especial appeal to the mem- 
bers of the Mission. There were many old women who were 
left with no one to care for them and who were often too 
feeble or ill or broken to care for themselves. These were 
gathered as far as possible in central "homes" where they 
received the care and attention which they needed. There 
were, too, hosts of orphan children in all sections of our 
areas. Their cases always made a peculiar appeal and they 
received a due share of the time and energy of the relief 
workers. They were gathered also at various centers and 
given good care and the best available substitute for home. 

Then there was the immediate care of throngs of refugees, 
both those who were swept out of the shelled sectors and 
those who came back through Switzerland from behind the 
German lines. The former were assembled, as we have seen, 
in constructed cites where they had good homes of their own 
while the others were quartered as comfortably as possible 
in the departments of France which were unthreatened and 
where they were supplied with a small financial allowance 
for their needs of life. Besides these there were broken 
parts of families who drifted to the regions which had been 

190 



RELIEF WORK 191 

partially devastated and afterwards left free by the with- 
drawal of the invading" armies. This latter case was true of 
the Marne district which had seen the retreat of the invad- 
ing army after the First Battle of the Marne. Neither Bar- 
le-Duc on the east of this Marne district nor Chalons-sur- 
Marne on the west were ever taken by the invading armies. 
They were both shelled and bombed and suffered much 
destruction, but nevertheless life went on in them. Here 
were huddled, therefore, many refugees from near-by re- 
gions and both these beautiful cities became important cen- 
ters of relief under our Mission. Great quantities of sewed 
and knitted garments which were made in our local centers 
in all parts of America where there were Friends eventually 
reached the storehouses of Bar-le-Duc and Chalons and 
other similar towns and here they were distributed by the 
trained relief workers. They visited the groups of refugees, 
or, as the case might be, the little scattered families which 
were endeavoring to maintain a kind of life amid the debris 
of the peasant villages and supplied them with clothes which 
they could put on in place of their tatters. Perhaps noth- 
ing was ever done which gave more real comfort to these 
long-suffering people than to put them into warm clothes. 
Life was unendurably bleak and their poor shelters were 
very cold in winter, so that warm, whole clothes came as a 
great blessing. With the clothes came, too, what they 
needed hardly less — love, affection and friendly sympathy. 
The distribution of pure milk for the children was another 
form of relief which occupied a number of workers. It was 
one of the most valuable of all the services of relief. Some 
of the milk supplied came from our own Mission cows, a 
large herd being kept for this purpose on the farm at Ven- 
ault-les-Dames. Hives of bees were also furnished to the 
peasants in some sections favorable for bees, so that families 



192 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

might use honey as a good substitute for sugar. One of the 
interesting centers for the '^ culture" of bees was at Evres. 
Rabbits, hares and chickens were also raised in great num- 
bers in many of the centers of agriculture and distributed by 
the relief workers. Garden utensils, farm implements and 
seeds for sowing and planting formed still another type of 
relief. There were also centers for the repair of farming 
tools and implements, which, in a world where almost 
everything customary had broken down, proved to be an 
almost indispensable form of help. As soon as the refugees 
were able to get back to their new homes, the relief workers 
helped them to get furniture for their houses, cooking dishes 
and utensils and other indispensable things for home life. 
In some centers besides doing ordinary sewing, the women 
were taught to make mattresses, pillows and that curious 
contrivance which the French call duvet — a, thick feather- 
quilt too short to cover the entire bed but very warm for 
the limited area that is covered! 

One of the great services of the mission of relief was that 
of teaching the women and girls, both in the villages and in 
the refugee groups, to make embroidery as a means of finan- 
cial self -assistance. This soon became an extensive business 
in all the relief centers. There were two main types of 
work in which they were instructed, (1) the white embroid- 
ery and (2) the colored work. Some preferred to work at 
one type and some at the other. The workers in the Mission 
supplied the embroidery cloth at a small price and also the 
thread and the wool, and they taught the art to the women. 
The women quickly became experts and turned out large 
quantities for sale. The sales were handled by the workers 
in charge and though the prices asked were not low, the 
work sold as rapidly as it could be made. The women took 
the raw material to their homes and therefore could look 



RELIEF WORK 193 

after their little children, if they had any and make a good 
living from the sales of their handiwork. It also kept their 
minds from their sorrows and enabled them in some sense 
to stand the hard world in which they found themselves. 
Besides this somewhat fine and delicate work, the relief 
centers also furnished other types of material for more com- 
mon forms of needlework. There were, too, other ways pro- 
vided by which the women could earn money for their sup- 
port or at least could assist toward it. These centers were 
extremely busy places, especially in the morning when the 
women came for their material and their designs. Here 
once more the point of contact was close between the helpers 
and those helped and interesting links of friendship were 
foimed. Sophia ]\I. Fry was head of Relief through the 
entire period of our service. She was most unsparing of 
herself and always busy with the plans for lessening the 
hard tragedy of the people. She was abounding in energy 
which seemed exhaustless, and she had power of endurance 
to go steadily on from one stage of relief to another without 
losing either vitality or human interest in those who con- 
stituted the problem. This labor of course involved fre- 
quent trips of investigation to study the needs of new re- 
gions, complicated problems of oversight and many trips 
from the remote centers to Paris for committee meetings, 
for consultation and for purchasing of material. This re- 
lief service offered a field for a large number of women 
workers, though some features and branches of it fell to the 
men, and each center had workers of both sexes. 

Besides the two centers already mentioned there were 
corresponding types of work carried on at Troyes, a city 
of fifty thousand inhabitants with a host of refugees, at 
Sermaize, at Vitry, at Charmont, at Bar-sur-Aube, at Rom- 
illy and at Lisieux. In the Chatillon district there were 



194 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

centers at Mareuil-le-port, Nanteuil, Vemeuil, at Pargny- 
les-Reims, with a small center also in the city of Rheims. 
At a later period in the Meuse there were relief centers at 
Grange-le-Compte, Saint e Menehould, Varennes, Les 
Islettes, Neuilly, Clermont, Fromereville near Verdun, Bra- 
bant, Dombasle, Givry-en-Argonne, and in the Ardennes at 
Grand Pre, Mouzon, Dun-sur-Meuse, Attigny and Chatel- 
Chehery. Finally there was an important center at Ham, 
after the return of refugees. 

The sense that all that they could do was after all but a 
drop in the bucket of abnormal human suffering — the allevi- 
ation of the distress of tens among thousands of needy — 
could not fail to weigh at times upon the Relief workers, 
especially perhaps when they were fresh on the field, and for 
the first time really confronted by the magnitude of their 
task. But one of the paragraphs of the encouraging mes- 
sage of the old-stager English workers to the new-coming 
Americans touches and illuminates this very point : 

"In the districts devastated by the war you may be disheart- 
ened by the immense mass of suffering and the smallness of the 
help it is possible to give. There is nothing we have felt more 
acutely ourselves during our three years out here. But along 
with this feeling of helplessness we have learnt something of 
the opposite. At a time when people are thinking in continents, 
in millions of lives and hundreds of millions of money, we have 
lived in small villages among humble people, doing unsensational 
though interesting work; we have come to see that personal sym- 
pathy and genuine understanding are all the more welcome at a 
time when individual personality is generally unconsidered." 

Friends, with their fundamental belief in the value of 
the individual, did not despise trifles. It was as worth their 
while to cheer up the children as to build houses or work the 
fields for their seniors. They were as ready to make a long 



RELIEF WORK 195 

and dangerous motor-trip to get one old woman out of a 
cellar as to fetch two-score. And having got them out they 
did not turn them adrift to fend for themselves but care- 
fully deposited them in some safe place where their care 
was assured. 

R. B. writes : 

"Yesterday I drove over 150 miles in a driving rain. I brought 
three refugees down from just back of the Hues. They were 
old women who had been living in a cellar ever since the Ger- 
mans were driven out of their village, and as they were con- 
tinually under shell-fire, they had hardly been out of this cellar 
for six months. All three were over sixty years old, and were 
nearly dead from underfeeding and exposure. The Unit has 
opened up a home for just such cases as these at Charmont. . . . 

"The life in these little Ftench villages that were destroyed by 
the war is awful. You can't imagine how any one could live for 
months in a cellar without a change of clothes or a bath. They 
come out of their holes just reeking with filth." 

Perhaps the description of this modest work at Charmont 
might come appropriately here, with an appreciation of the 
amount of devotion which is necessarily entailed on the 
American girl, Frances Ferris, who undertook the charge of 
it. Here is her own description, with all reference to ser- 
vice or sacrifice conspicuous by its absence : 

"Charmont does not belie its name. It is a picturesque vil- 
lage crowning the hills that border the Mame valley, about 
ten kilometers north of Sermaize. Some twenty years ago this 
was one of the richest vineyards of Champagne, and the com- 
fortable farm houses still betoken the prosperity of the village. 
But a blight struck the vines and the fields were turned to 
farms, and the farming is now carried on on a small scale, 
merely for the individual family maintenance rather than for 
profit. The surrounding forest lands offer the largest industry 



196 SERVICE OP LOVE IN WAR TIME 

of the district at present, and daily processions of ancient dames 
pass the door, bearing enormous burdens of fagots on their backs 
in cornucopia baskets. The slopes are covered with orchards that 
next month must clothe the landscape with a drift of bloom. 

"The little equipe here, consisting at this moment of one 
American and ten old women refugees, had its genesis after 
the Fall bombardments at Bar. It seemed necessary to find 
some place near enough to Bar, to which these infirm old 
people, not ill, but not able to sleep in the caves, could be 
brought by automobile. Charmont, not being on any railroad, 
is totally unimportant from a military point of view, and so 
is fairly safe. Six weeks of rain, rats and wretchedness were 
spent in an abandoned old chateau near by, before the present 
cosy farm-house was secured and the menage moved in. The 
location is on the edge of the village, overlooking a wide expanse 
of country to the west. It is the site of the ancient chateau of 
Renaumont, twice destroyed, once by a thunderball, the second 
time in the Revolution by a mob who came, so the story goes, 
to murder two priests as they were holding midnight services in 
the chapel. A moat still surrounds the place, where ducks paddle 
peacefully and groups of garrulous women bat and rinse their 
blancJiissage. The present buildings were the farm- and out-houses 
of the old chateau. The great greniers and sheds stand empty 
and swept, ready to receive a possible influx of refugees, if the 
Spring brings a new bombardment at Bar. At present, the 
distant booming of the cannon in the Argonne, or an occasional 
high-flying Boche plane are the only disturbers of the peace. 

But Charmont's raison d'etre is not merely to furnish a shelter 
for a handful of stranded old refugee women. The doctor holds 
a weekly clinic here and considerable amateur medical work is 
done in the village. A shop has been opened where stuffs, bed- 
ding and furniture are sold at reduced prices to refugees. Re- 
cently an ouvroir has been opened at Nettancourt, near by, where 
cut-out clothing is distributed for sewing, the same to be sold 
afterward in the shop later in the Spring; when the roads get 
more passable — or navigable rather — the Verdun visiting will be 



RELIEF WORK 197 

done by bicycle in the district to the north. As the work in the 
^New Meuse' develops, Charmont may even become a pied-a-terre 
(relief center) of some importance for that region. Thus Char- 
mont makes no pretentions, but tries to fill a modest place of 
real service in the work of the Mission." 

Something v^hich may seem in itself slight among so much 
important work, and yet which displays the spirit of the 
Friends Mission supremely, was the celebration of Christ- 
mas which was undertaken by all the equipes, as near as pos- 
sible to the 25th of December. For three years no Christ- 
mas celebration had been held in any of the war-zone 
villages, and the younger children had hardly any memory 
of it as a festive season. In fact, any sort of parties or 
rejoicing was foreign to their gray little war-ridden lives. 
In the Christmas parties held by the Friends, the wonderful, 
never-to-be-recaptured rapture of childhood was given to 
these little ones who had so far been denied their rightful 
heritage. And the grown-up folks shared in their joy. 
Joy, in the midst of sorrow, misery and desolation — it was 
no small contribution to France to bring it into being even 
in a few scattered villages. For Christmas, 1917, at the sug- 
gestion of Charles Evans, the Philadelphia Committee sent 
over a ton of candy put up in little individual boxes. The 
celebration at Gruny is typical of many others. There 
is no better way of reproducing its spirit than by quoting 
from the first-hand accounts of workers who shared in its 
labor and its fun: 

"Our men in France are not only using their hands in building 
houses, repairing machinery, tilling fields, and threshing grain, 
but they are using their big hearts in bringing new hope and joy 
into the lives of the people among whom they are working. 

"Do you ask what place a Christmas entertainment has in the 
stern business of reconstruction ? The French people will answer 



198 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

that it has a most important place. Upon the present children 
of France will rest a staggering burden. The birth-rate, which 
was too low before the war, has been cut in half. Two million 
of the younger men have been killed or permanently injured. 
Children such as those told of below must bear the burden of a 
debt-burdened, war-drained country. 

"All the heroic, buoyant spirit that has preserved Trance 
in the past will be required. For three years the spirits of these 
children have been crushed under the weight of a calamity they 
could not understand. Occasions such as that described below 
help to produce a normal childhood in preparation for the tasks 
ahead." 

Parvin M. Russell writes from Gruny, Sonmie, France, 
12—30—1917 :— 

"To begin with, the little school here had to be discontinued 
when the Germans took possession in 1914, and since they almost 
demolished it when leaving last spring, one of our first steps 
was to rebuild the large holes in the brick walls, put on a good 
slate roof and replace the broken windows and doors. As a re- 
sult, school was started again this fall in one small room, the 
teacher using a table for herself, having neither books nor black- 
board, very few pencils or other equipment — not even a separate 
chair for herself, and the children ranging from about 5 to 12 
years, all together and seated on plain benches with no back 
supports (except that they might lean against the wall) and with 
nothing to write on except several old flat top tables. To add 
to the difficulties of equipment and environment, you may imagine 
what a proposition it was to handle the older children who had 
experienced nothing more than a desultory sort of home discipline 
for three years. Practically none of the older children could read, 
and progress was of course exceedingly slow. But with time 
a much larger room was put in shape, accommodating a number 
of nice new desks of graded sizes, the walls had been white- 
washed to improve the light, and about two weeks before Christ- 
mas the school moved into the new room. It was almost pathetic 



RELIEF WORK 199 

that in the necessary haste of preparing for them, we could 
only put up a long board with a number of nails in it as a coat 
rack, but of course it is the essential usefulness that counts and 
not appearances, now. Then a consignment of new books arrived, 
and other equipment, putting the school on a working basis once 
more, and all as a precedent for our Christmas party! 

PREPARATIONS FOR CHRISTMAS *^ 

"Four of the fellows in our group here had received a con- 
siderable sum of money from some friends in New York, to pro- 
vide a real Christmas for the children of the village. Plans 
had been arranged well in advance, and one of the boys had 
gone to Paris to obtain the necessary gifts, useful and entertain- 
ing. 

"Snow came. A series of deep frosts followed, and a bright 
moon came at night. The ruined village was lost; in its place 
we saw quaint Christmas-card pictures, with impossibly bright 
moonlight, and little cottages snuggling down into the snow, 
their single lights twinkling like stars of inside warmth and hospi- 
tality. In spite of the wrecks under the snow, it seemed like 
Christmas. 

"It came time to open the mysterious black-papered bundles 
of toys that Murray had brought from Paris. Our dining-room 
tables were loaded down with great heaps of dolls and sail-boats 
and toy animals and horns. Less conspicuous, but equally Christ- 
masy were the toy watches, and real watches (for a few older 
children), the pocket knives and the scissors. In great colored 
heaps were the good practical knitted caps, sweaters, mittens 
and stockings sent from home. Each child was to have a set, and 
a handkerchief and a cake of soap. 

"Mademoiselle, the school-mistress, gave us all the children's 
names, and we knew them well enough to put the right things 
in the right bundles. By the end of the evening the toy shop 
had disappeared and in its stead was a pile of thirty-seven goodly 
bundles, each bearing a name and a picture card with ^Bon 
Noel.' 



200 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

"Talk at meals for several days was largely concerned with 
the problem, Would it be right to take a certain spruce from be- 
hind a certain ruined house. The night the paper chains were 
made for the Christmas tree — (not the spruce after all, but a tall 
cedar) — the dining-room saw a strange sight. Hands hardened 
by axes and hammers were pasting little strips of gold and 
silver paper — these great big fellows were returning to their 
kindergarten days, preparing the Christmas party. 

"The party was on Christmas eve. The day before a load 
of our fellows arrived from Ham. It was a home-coming for 
some of them, for our equipe is very much of a family, and 
if you leave, you're glad to come back even for a visit. They 
were kept busy; some men decorating the school-room with ever- 
green boughs, others carrying chairs, others rehearsing the musi- 
cal part of the program, another group working on the odds 
and ends for next day's dinner — seeding raisins, cracking nuts, 
peeling chestnuts. The boys kept me busy giving them jobs — 
they ranged from grinding dry bread in a coffee mill to plucking 
pinfeathers out of the turkeys with pincers! 

"And finally two o'clock arrived — evening begins early in this 
dark and wintry country. Well ahead of time, Gruny had as- 
sembled in the ^Ecole Communale/ it was the first time in three 
years. Three Christmases had gone uncelebrated and now three 
nations were celebrating Christmas together. No wonder the 
children in the front rows were thrilled and restless for things to 
start! No wonder the rows and rows of benches were crowded 
with best shawls and Sunday 'kerchiefs. 

"Music started the program. It is surprising how these chil- 
dren enjoy music; ordinarily, the music alone would have quite 
contented them, but how can you sit perfectly still when your 
mind is filled with your recitation and your curiosity as to the 
contents of those packages under that Christmas tree? 

"The little tots, standing on their chairs in front so as not 
to be hidden, turned to face the audience and began their part 
with a song. Then came recitations, most of them short, but 
spoken with fine spirit and expression. I kept wondering if 



BELIEF WORK 201 

Americans so young could do so well. One of the girls who 
showed grave signs of stage-fright heard her mother's cheer- 
ful advice from the back of the room: 'Ne pleurez pas!' — (Don't 
cry!) 

"Best of all was a little girl so tiny that she had to be stood 
on a chair to be seen. Without fear, and unprompted, she told 
the story of her little finger, which she held up as high as her 
general chubbiness would permit. 

*'Much as we enjoyed the performances of the children, how- 
ever, it was none other than the Mayor who afforded us the most 
genuine amusement of the day. One of our men, Pamell, was 
performing a number of tricks, among which was the feature 
of apparently swallowing a dozen needles, and a yard of thread, 
separately, and then drawing the thread out with the needles, 
all dangling from it, neatly threaded. There was not a face but 
was blank with amazement and wonder, but the Mayor with all 
dignity forsaken leaned forward with mouth wide open, and with 
tongue describing the most comical movements as the needles, 
one after another, issued from Pamell's lips. That picture will 
only die with memory itself. 

GIFTS AEE DISTRIBUTED 

"When the moment came for the distribution of the gifts, 
thirty-five boys and girls were transported into a state of anxious 
ecstasy, for although the bundles had been carefully prepared 
and each one labeled with a name, who could not tell but that one 
name might have been lost or one bundle misplaced ? So the little 
hearts thumped and the fears grew, as one after another the 
names were called, and the packages beneath the tree became 
fewer and fewer, but how the waiting faces lit up at the sound 
of their respective names, and how the little forms forsook 
their places with the alacrity of corn in the popper when all the 
fears of a possible disappointment dissolved in an armful of won- 
ders! 

"Then we learned what French ^compliments' are. A little 
girl stood up and read, with the sincerity of real appreciation. 



202 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

a statement of appreciation and thanks on behalf of the school 
children; an older girl read a similar document on behalf of 
*les civiles/ and finally quite unexpectedly, the Mayor arose with 
a 'compliment' of his own writing which he read in the name of 
the Commune, with a deep sincerity. It was a beautiful state- 
ment; one that moistened the eyes of many of the people. We 
all prize this very highly; besides expressing appreciation for the 
actual labors of our hands, it shows an understanding of the 
fundamental reason for our coming. 

"Little bags of candy were there for the children, and little 
tarts for their parents; and before we sang 'America,' it was an- 
nounced that one sack of potatoes for each family was waiting 
at the Agricultural equipe. As the people went out, each and 
every one shook hands with each of us near the door, and they 
were grateful handshakes on both sides! We had initiated the 
party; Gruny had given us its Christmas blessing. 

"None of us knows the story of the opening of the presents 
— that happened about the home fires." 

The sequel to the Christmas celebration at Gruny is one 
that throws a charming light on the gratitude of the French 
and the vrarm relations of friendship that had been estab- 
lished between them and the Relief workers. 

One of the workers tells, 

"of happy children who came to pay party calls next day, and 
the Mayor's wife says to us. And when the children are happy, 
it makes the mothers happy too.' 

"The children went into the church and had a grand christen- 
ing of their dolls on Christmas afternoon; they had mass and 
vespers — then the baptism, with priest and godparents and 
parents. Each child named her doll after herself with an 'ine' 
added: — Marcello, Marcelhne; Isabel, Isabelline. It grew dark 
before they were done, but they found one candle to light them 
to the end. None of us saw it, but the children came to tell 
about it afterward." 



RELIEF WORK 203 

"The kids kept telling us they were coming to see us New 
Year's Day. ... I tried to put them off, because I knew it would 
interfere with work to have a bunch of kids around the house. . . . 

"When I came back from my rounds New Year's afternoon 
there they were, fifteen or twenty kids sitting in a circle, per- 
fectly still, their legs dangling from their chairs. There was a 
mumble of 'Bonne annee* and 'Bonne sante, M'sieur Victor' as 
I came in; then they sat down again and relapsed into their 
former grinning silence. Every time one of the fellows came in, 
they all stood up to greet him and wish him a happy New Year; 
then they would all sit down again with the same mysterious 
unanimity. 

"Suddenly they all stood up. One little girl, Andree Gambart, 
took an envelope out of her pocket, and read a 'complimenf — 
a tribute to us written in the most formal style. I've got it here. 
She tucked it back in its envelope and presented it to us with a 
bow. Then a little boy, Fernand Caron, read and presented an- 
other. 

"This is Andree's : — 

"'Gentlemen and dear benefactors: — In the name of my 
family, deeply touched by your goodness to the children of 
Gruny, and in my own name, I come to-day on the threshold of 
the New Year, to address to you my most sincere wishes for a 
Happy New Year. My greatest thanks for the happy Christmas 
which you gave us, which made us forget the three preceding 
years, passed in the midst of the barbarians. Although my pen 
is feeble, believe, dear benefactors, that these thanks come from 
the bottom of my heart. May the New Year bring us victory and 
peace, so that the place of the absent ones may be filled at our 
hearthsides, and let us hope that the next Christmas will be cele- 
brated by the families all together. 

" 'Once more, dear benefactors, with my most sincere wishes, 
for the New Year, I thank you. 

'Andree Gambart.' 

"And this is Pernand's : — 

"'Our Very Dear Allies: — By means of this sheet of paper 



204 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

we come to wish you, I as well as my sisters and my family, 
not forgetting the whole population of Gruny, — we come to wish 
you all a good year and perfect health, and to give you our 
thanks for the toys and delicacies which you have given us, and 
our dear comrades, and for the Christmas tree you have made 
for us, and for the happy day that we had all together in our 
school-house at Gruny, the school-house which you, dear Ameri- 
cans, rebuilt. Let us hope that the year 1918 will be happier for 
us than those which preceded, and that this war, which causes 
so much suffering, so much sorrow, and so many tears throughout 
the world, will soon be over, returning our valiant soldiers, as 
well as you, dear Americans, and our dear English, who have 
crossed the sea to deliver our France from Prussian barbarians, 
to their homes. But we, like the other people of Gruny, don't 
know how to thank you for the devotion which you have shown, 
dear Americans, and our dear English, in leaving your home lands 
to deliver France from the claws of the barbarians. But from 
the bottom of our hearts we wish that the war may end this year, 
so that every one can go home again. 

" 'Receive, dear Americans, our sincere salutations, and the 
heartiest thanks of my family. 

"'Fernand Caron.'" 

Before the day was over, said the man from Gruny, we 
had had forty visitors and seven ^^ compliments.'^ 

It was not only for exceptional kindnesses and treats that 
these ^^compliments" were penned as acknowledgment. 
The daily round, the common task had furnished innumer- 
able opportunities for the men who were there to look for 
opportunities to give help and comfort. 

"Some days they gave us a lot to do. I was putting in a 
window in the school-house one day when a mother came run- 
ning up excitedly crying that her baby was dying. As a matter 
of fact, the baby was in convulsions, but they were due to 
cutting teeth — not serious at all. I succeeded in quieting the 



BELIEF WORK 205 

mother, and that quieted the child. But the mother has been con- 
vinced ever since that I saved the baby's life. 

"That same evening, just after supper, in came a French- 
man stumbling in excitement. 'Come quick/ he said; 'Jeanne is 
dying.' 

"Jeanne was his twelve-year-old daughter; she had been sick, 
very sick; and she kept sick because she would not stay in bed. 
I hurried over there, and fomid the household in an awful shape. 
There were the mother and five kids, one girl of sixteen, — the 
most excitable creature imaginable; — Jeanne; and three little 
ones, all crying. Jeanne was back in bed. Her mother told me 
she had had convulsions and nearly died. She really was sick — 
some kidney trouble; her hands, feet and face were all swollen. 
I stayed and worked over her until after one, with hot packs 
and compresses, and finally got her quieted. After that I used 
to go and see her every day. Just before I left Jeanne's mother 
came to me and said, 'You've saved Jeanne's life and my life 
too.' (She had an infected foot, which I used to dress every 
day.) 'What shall we do without you?' 

"That sort of thing makes it worth while." 

Readiness for sudden emergency was one of the qualities 
demanded of the Relief vrorker, whatever his specialty of 
work might normally be. Imagine the organizing power 
and adaptability required of the Bettancourt equipe when 
they had to prepare at a moment 's notice for the reception 
of over sixty children evacuated from Bar-le-Duc on ac- 
count of increased bombardment. No telegraphing for sup- 
plies to come in by Express — what was already stretched to 
what seemed its utmost limit had to be made to go further, 
and the district ransacked for makeshift material. More- 
over, men whose hands seemed already occupied to the full 
and more, had to find time to bathe and discipline the mot- 
ley crowd of boys, while the women workers had to accept 
the girls asipart of their day's work. 



206 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

"The family were taken for a walk eveiy possible afternoon by 
two preceptors. One brought up the rear with a fat black- 
pinafored twin on each side, and the other skirmished lightly up 
and down the road, trying to guard the communal apple-trees 
that lined it. It took an agile man to do this — as easily keep a 
swarm of bees off honey; but to the credit of the preceptors be 
it said that in time and after kindly discipline the boys would 
pass an apple-tree and only glean the fallen ones. ... It was 
amazing how many apples they could eat and be no worse — 
saving only one twin, who made his suffering so audible one 
night that he had to be carried down to the fire and warmed and 
comforted." 

This crush only lasted for about three weeks, and then the 
children moved on and Bettancourt resumed its wonted 
calm of regular work. Another curious piece of emergency 
work was the evacuating of the Amiens Insane Asylum, and 
the conveying of 800 insane patients from Amiens to a 
refuge up in the Pyrenees. This work was given to the 
American Red Cross by the French Department of the 
Interior, and was immediately turned over by them to the 
Friends Unit. 

W, H. writes, first from Paris : 

"All well and safe so far. We have had an exciting experi- 
ence carrying wounded soldiers and helping fugitive civilians 
with shells dropping down like hail. Dodging them is anything 
but pleasant. My ears are still a bit deaf from the noise. Groups 
have been formed who will take fugitive trains as they pass 
through Paris and go with them to some village in southern 
France. There we will help arrange for food and lodging, then 
return for another train. Others of us are still north with the 
American Red Cross. 

"I just returned from a big hunt for canteen materials to feed 



RELIEF WORK 207 

the refugees. A report just in of a thousand refugees to be 
housed to-night. Something new happens every minute. . . . 

"Again on the move. I am now at Lourdes, in the Pyrenees 
Mountains. High, snow-capped mountains rise on every side. 
What a change it is from the flat Somme. Not many hours 
after I last wrote from Paris, a call came for help in conveying 
and placing some 800 insane refugees down here. So 0. S., C. M., 
I. H., six others and myself responded to the emergency call, 
though all were dead tired. 

"After leaving Bordeaux we passed through miles of pine. 
We had to stand, all this part of the journey, which lasted five 
hours." 

Then two engines hooked on, and the train began to climb 
up into the Pyrenees, the scenery increasing in beauty and 
majesty every hour. 

"We arrived at Lourdes at 6:30, the sun still thirty degrees 
above the horizon. We had a good supper and then reported 
at the hospital, where we had the pleasant job of helping the 
insane patients to bed. The long ride had made them quite wild. 
Some had had to be strait-jacketed on the road. In general, all 
they needed was leading. About half of them are women. 
Most of the men are soldiers, and are suffering from shell-shock. 
Our job now is to guard the place at night, as there are no 
bars to the windows. 

"This is the strangest job and with the strangest people I have 
ever seen. Lourdes is a famous Catholic center for missions. 
The waters here are supposed to heal all diseases. Fine church 
bells peal in the mountain air continually. The early part of 
last night I was on outside watch. Every fifteen minutes the 
chimes rang out. On a mountain across the way a cross stands 
illuminated all night. 

"I tended lower hall in the early morning. A number of the 
men talked loudly in their sleep, and occasionally one would 



208 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

get up and appear on the scene with practically no cover. We 
take him gently by the shoulders and lead him back to bed. 

"This work is just temporary. In a week we shall have to 
move these men farther into the mountains, and then their nurses 
can take entire care of them. . . ." 

The diary of C. M. adds the following details: 

"Some little interest was aroused by a man who until yester- 
day had been working, but now for two days has been lying 
on his back quietly saying: *0h, la, la, I am dead.' Then look- 
ing at his fingers and stretching them in proof, 'No, I'm not dead.' 
Then again, 'Oh, I'm dead.' Over and over, — no sleep, no com- 
fort. They have put his hands in socks to try to keep his at- 
tention off them. 

"The place is quiet by ten. The head doctor has come around 
and chatted; said how sorry he was to have us leave him so 
soon ; that our guarding has made a record unheard of. Not one 
escaped. 

"11:30 — The poor fellow who keeps thinking himself dead is 
quietly snoring. He can have no question as to his being alive 
now, for he has gotten up and refuses to lie down. He talks 
loudly and wildly. A second guard rushes down from upstairs. 
Two others follow. A more learned day-guard is called, and a 
Blue Sister appears. There is a struggle for a time; arms and 
legs bound do not hold him quiet; he keeps talking, shouting; 
then sobs a bit. They slap his face — (it doesn't look like very en- 
lightened treatment — ) and throw him to the floor. He is finally 
tied in bed; water dashed in his face. He talks so excitedly that 
his bed is taken into the hall. 

"2 :30 — He kept talking a long time but has quieted down now. 

"6 :00— The change of guards. It hardly is light, but the day 
doorman soon appears, and the key is being handed over. We 
set out for petit dejeuner and bed." 



CHAPTER XV 

BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 

Last summer on my farm in Maine I was cutting down a 
large hemlock tree one day by the shore of the lake. As I 
cut into the hollow center of the great tree I found that I 
had unexpectedly invaded the home of a million ants. The 
ax smote unpityingly through their habitation and produced 
a scene of wild commotion. Many of them were cut in 
two by the sudden blow of the ax. Their eggs were crushed 
beyond repair. Their provisions for the winter were 
thrown in all directions. There was a mad scramble for 
safety. Every ant started to go somewhere, carrying some- 
thing as though it had all been arranged in advance. It 
was a refugee exodus in great numbers, though the indi- 
viduals were of pigmy size, with little forecast of the woes 
to follow. 

In my sorrow for what I had unwittingly done I thought 
at once of the corresponding scenes on a larger scale when 
the great drives of the war smote down through the quiet, 
happy towns and villages of the Mame, the Meuse, the 
Aisne, the Somme and many another section of northern 
France. The shells which fell upon these homes left almost 
nothing standing. What the ax did for the tiny bodies of 
the ants the shells did for the women and the children who 
happened to be in the path of the fragments into which the 
shells were blown. A similar exodus followed. There was 
a wild rush for the precious things of the household and 

209 



210 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

such a procession as only war can produce streamed south 
from every hamlet. Carts drawn by donkey, dog or cow 
carried children, bedding and the few things saved in the 
frightened hurry. There were pitiable separations. In- 
valids were left behind, too ill to go. Tragedies were en- 
acted which wrote themselves ineffaceably on the tablets of 
human hearts. At first, as soon as it became safe to do so, 
the refugees crept back to live in the cellars or amid the 
ruins of their beloved villages, but the experiment proved 
costly. The cellar life and the terrible exposures to weather 
produced a great amount of tuberculosis and kindred dis- 
eases. Gradually the authorities forbade the refugees to 
return to their villages until they had suitable homes to 
live in. This situation gave us our call. 

The house building work was well under way before the 
American Unit arrived but we were able to give it great 
expansion by bringing on the scene a large group of effi- 
cient house-builders. The first factory — the one in opera- 
tion when we came in — was at Dole, in the Jura. This is a 
very interesting, picturesque town on the swift-flowing 
Doubs. It was here, in a little street which now bears his 
name, that Pasteur was born. When the war broke upon 
them the people of the town were building a large impres- 
sive school-building, the solid stone walls of which were one 
story high, when all the men were suddenly called to mobil- 
ize These walls were roofed over by the English Friends 
and here a house-building factory was constructed. Bar- 
racks were put in an open field about a mile from the fac- 
tory for the living quarters of the workers, and here about 
fifty men settled in to make portable houses after a well- 
chosen design. The lumber was supplied by the govern- 
ment and came in by trains from the forests of Alpine foot- 
hills, not far away. The houses were generally of three 



BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 211 

rooms, though as they were built in sections they could be 
either larger or smaller as need dictated. They were made 
of planed matched boards and were double with an air 
space between the outer and inner boards. The floors, too, 
were matched with tongue and groove. The roofs were built 
to take tile covering, the latter being supplied from the 
region where the house was to be set up. They were well 
supplied with windows and doors and when they were con- 
structed they were stained a pretty brown to fit the roof- 
tiles. 

While the men were training at Haverf ord J. Henry Scat- 
tergood and some of the English workers planned another 
factory at Omans, in the department of Doubs. They 
found and got the rent of an automobile factory on the 
banks of the Loue which rushes through the town. They 
also took over an absinthe factory to serve as living quarters 
for the workers. A large part of the mill machinery was 
bought in America and was a part of the material which 
got hung up in the shipping jam at the time when our first 
body of workers went over. After heart-breaking delays, 
however, the machinery finally arrived and was installed by 
our men under the direction of Philip Hussey with Leslie 
Heath in charge of electric work. A factory for doors and 
windows was also provided across the stream from the larger 
mill. Omans was beautifully situated in the French foot- 
hills of the Alps, about fifteen miles from Besangon. The 
town was not large, but attractive and contained many 
interesting families. Here about fifty men of the Mission, 
at first mostly Americans, worked at houses, doors and win- 
dows. Here is a fine poem, written by one of the men, L. 
Griswold Williams, which well expresses the spirit of the 
workers : 



212 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 



THE FRIENDS RECONSTRUCTION UNIT— THE 
MANUFACTURING DEPARTMENT 

I've been making windows — 

Oak windows in our shop along the river — 

Thinking of where they'll go and what they'll maybe do: 

Windows to overlook the crumpled roofs of clattering towns, 

To open out across the silent wastedness of trampled farms, 

On white-scarred vineyard slopes, 

Or shattered woodlands healing at the touch of Spring. 

Some may be gates of magic liberation. 

Giving on living worlds of leaf and sky, 

Where those whose feet can never tread dear earth 

Shall send their spirits wandering far; 

At these will children climb to greet the infant moon. 

Or press their noses tight, watching the first snow feathers fall; 

Through here may little breaths of morning murmur; 

This humble shrine day's glowing eltax fires. . . . 

And I've been making doors — 

Doors that shall open as a sheltering hand to harassed hearts 
Praying a solace in some broken place; 
Doors guarding at last those helpless ones 
Guns could not guard nor armies make secure. 

Here homing age may fumble at a lock. 

Or venturing youth push wide with eager hand; 

This door may usher Birth with hopefulness. 

Close quietly when Death has passed with friendly eyes. 

Or part relentlessly two lovers, lingering with reluctant lips at 

dusk; 
Here may a woman lean with shadowed face, 
Waiting a lad — who lies in an untilled field. . . . 



BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 213 

I've not made doors and windows for chateaux or palaces — 

Only for little wooden demontahles 

To shelter mostly simple folk 

Dripped from the grinding jaws of War. 

Red tiles will be for roof, the walls be brown, and green the 

white-knobbed doors. 
The sections bolt together easily. 
As barren as a shed for animals almost, 
Until my doors and windows make it — Home. . . , 

patient Master Workman of the world, 

Shaper of all this home of humankind ! 

Teach me the truer trade of making doors and windows for men's 

souls: 
Windows for letting in Love's widening dawn, 
Doors swinging outward freely on Truth's pleasant ways. 

Each factory was under a directing head who was elected 
by the workers themselves and approved by the Paris Execu- 
tive. The body of workers in their living quarters were 
under the c'are and oversight of the chef d' equipe who, 
again, was elected by the men. They were far from the 
exciting world of Paris or the war-zones and sometimes the 
work and the life must have seemed dull and routine, but 
they had gone over to express their faith and love and most 
of them accepted the conditions in loyal spirit and worked 
with all their might. They had plenty to eat, though it 
was plain and plainly served, but the fello.wship and com- 
radeship gave a very fine flavor to the life. 

Sometimes it was difficult to deliver the houses from the 
factories v^thout long delays in the railroad transit, owing 
to the ease with which freight cars can be shunted off on 
side tracks, and forgotten. To avoid this contingency, so 
distressing when the workers in the war-zones were eagerly 
waiting for them to arrive, men were occasionally asked to 



214 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

volunteer to take the trip on top of the load of houses from 
the factory to the point of destination. There were always 
plenty of men keen and ready for this freight-expedition 
which had neither Pullman nor dining-car facilities ! But 
when a member of the Mission was on the load the car was 
not shunted to a side track. 

The work in the factories was pushed along at the best 
available speed, sometimes with night shift of workers, but 
even so the houses could not be turned out fast enough to 
supply the demand of the returning refugees or of the 
building department. To meet the emergency, arising after 
the signing of the armistice, the reconstruction department 
of the French government promised the Mission a supply 
of two thousand portable houses to supplement our own out- 
put. Only a part of this number were actually received 
and that, too, after a long wait, but the assistance to our 
work was very valuable. This arrangement enabled the 
Mission to close down the factory at Omans (and later at 
Dole) and turn in the men of these two eqidpes to help in 
the work of the zones where the actual reconstruction was 
going forward. 

The new men as they arrived from America were pretty 
generally sent first to Dole or Ornans to have an apprentice 
period at manufacturing houses unless they had outstanding 
gifts and qualifications which plainly marked them out for 
a special piece of work just then waiting to be done. As 
the new men came into the manufacturing equipes the older 
workers, who had served their turn of manufacturing on the 
banks of the Doubs or the Loue, were told off for some other 
task in Paris or in the devastated areas, so that Dole and 
Omans always had a somewhat shifting population of 
workers. Thus a very large number of our entire group 
of men in the Mission had a longer or shorter period of 



BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 215 

life in Dole or Ornans and had some part in the making of 
houses. 

The building department had a wholly different task and 
a very different life. The workers in this department went 
out often to the very frontiers of civilian life. They were 
quartered not seldom in the midst of debris and in a silent, 
deserted world where havoc had worked its full measure of 
desolation. Sometimes they repaired broken roofs and 
made half-destroyed houses habitable, sometimes they found 
no houses complete enough to warrant repairs. Their main 
work was the construction of demountable houses, furnished 
to them by the manufacturing department and the transport 
department. The parts of the houses came in on motor 
trucks from the nearest railway center and the builders 
*'did the rest." 

To rebuild the school and provide a teacher was one of 
the first tasks undertaken by the Friends in Gruny, a speci- 
men village. A passer-by gives a glimpse of the building 
work: 

". . . We saw two more brown-overalled figures, H. and M., 
with arm loads of sound boards which they had filched out of 
the remnants of a completely destroyed house and were carry- 
ing over to the house they were repairing. It didn't look much 
of a home, that house. But when you studied it a bit more closely, 
and saw how much had already been done, you appreciated what 
the boys were doing. They had had to put in a new I-beam, 
and half the roof was slated. They had patched up broken parts 
of the wall and gradually that house was becoming habitable. 
As fast as the houses are finished the sous-prefet sends in another 
refugee family. . . . 

"Down a side-road we caught a glimpse of some more Friend 
boys, English and American, busily cleaning bricks to finish a 
side-wall which was nearly completed. They pointed out half-a- 
dozen near-by houses with roofs patched with slates of a darker 



216 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

color, brought from the other end of the village, where the de- 
struction had been much worse. . . . 

"When you give a family even a tiny two-roomed shelter 
to live in where there was nothing but a heap of dust and a few 
jagged bits of stone and plaster, you have given it something to 
call home." 

The new hope and cheer brought into the lives of these 
peasants by the presence and work of the Friends is some- 
thing that cannot be measured by counting a few hundred 
houses repaired or set up in a wilderness of desolation; 
yet in many places a beautiful wilderness, for grass and 
wild flowers tiegan to cover all scars, and the roses and 
nasturtiums and asters began to flower luxuriantly in the 
ruined gardens. "What was under the ground" war could 
not kill. 

"It is splendid," writes another worker, "to see things getting 
done; jobs being finished — and finished in such a way that they 
are neither blots on the landscape nor obviously repairs. I'm 
thinking specially of one slate roof that was in a most hopelessly 
moth-eaten condition — now it looks as if nothing had happened — 
even lichens are growing on the slates. It will be that way with 
much of our work; although it will not be so easy to show off 
or point to what we have done — it is far more satisfying to think 
of healing without leaving conspicuous scars. 

"The school-house is one of the biggest jobs — and the first one 
to be undertaken. It was very badly damaged and is requiring 
a lot of brickwork. P., an Englishman, is a professional mason ; 
he has been working hard at this; yet you do not notice the new 
work at all without careful examination of the mortar. They 
had a little ceremony of a corner-stone when the work was first 
begun. The neighborhood was invited, and the Mayor read a 
document composed for the occasion, explaining the work of the 
Friends, and proposing to place a tablet on the spot later on. 
A cent, an English penny, and a French sou were put in the wall, 




^td^^ ^ Jm^ • . ^ 




r^M 


III 




71 


Buiiaui- Demountable Houbes 





BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 217 

along with a copy of the Mayor's speech signed by all wit- 
nesses. Another copy of this is held by the Mayor." 

In many villages it was not felt to be desirable to put 
the new houses on the sites of the old ones, since the owners 
usually preferred to leave the ruins undisturbed until their 
indemnity had been settled. Indemnities were always in 
their minds, and they believed, probably rightly, that great 
heaps of ruin would make a much stronger appeal upon the 
indemnity officials than would a pretty new cottage! In 
cases where the houses were not desired on the old spot, an 
attractive location was selected near the former village and 
a new cite was built, consisting usually of a main street with 
rows of houses on either side, not far separated from each 
other. The number of houses to be built was generally de- 
termined by the mayor of the village if lie could be found. 
He would make lists of existing families, or parts of fami- 
lies large enough to occupy a house. The Cure of the local 
church also had intimate knowledge of the little community 
and could assist, as he almost always did, in the plans for 
reconstruction. 

The foundations of the cottages were carefully laid and 
then when the loads of house-parts arrived — which they did 
not always do at the expected date ! — the men worked like 
beavers putting them up. They became great experts at 
this job. Sometimes a group of them ' * raced ' ' with another 
near-by group to see which could get its house done first. 
But hurry did not mean faulty work. The- houses were 
built '^on honor" and every part of every one had to be 
right. Labor hours were not shortened to the modern scale 
nor was the speed of work the sort one has learned to expect 
from laborers. Where volunteers labor under the incentive 
of love there is sure to be- drive and energy as there certainly 



218 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

was in this case. I have already spoken of the Marne and 
the Somme and the two large regions of reconstruction be- 
fore the work of the ''Verdun area" Avas undertaken. 
There was besides a quite extensive work in what may be 
called the Chatillon district. It lies about half way between 
Chateau-Thierry and Rheims — a beautiful ridge of fertile 
country abounding in vineyards and excellent for wheat. 
Our men began their work for this region first at Chateau- 
Thierry itself, soon after the famous battle. Then Chatil- 
lon-sur-Marne became the central equipe for a large sur- 
rounding district which had suffered terribly during the 
great drive and retreat. Everything had gone down before 
the big shells and homes no longer existed. As usual there 
was a combination of construction work, relief work and 
agricultural work, but the great need was for homes so that 
the peasants could come back and re-cultivate their rich 
soil. Many of the vineyards had been ruined by poison 
gases and the land needed quick attention. The important 
centres for reconstruction in this district were Chatillon 
itself, Vemeuil, Olizy, Cuchery, Champlat, Chaumuzy and 
the famous* battle town, Ville-en-Tardenois. Some of the 
houses were repaired and re-roofed. In other cases new 
houses were built after the manner already described. The 
work in this region was pushed rapidly forward, lasting 
only through the winter following the armistice when the 
men went on to join in the great concentrated tasks laid 
upon us in the Meuse, i. e. the Verdun region lying between 
the city of Verdun on the east and the western margin of 
the Argonne forest. I shall have more to say of building 
in the next chapter which relates to this crowning work of 
the Mission. 

One of the most beautiful features of this construction 
work was the transforming effect which it had upon the vil- 



BUILDING AND KECONSTRUCTION 219 

lage people to whom the relief came. Leland Hadley has 
given a glimpse of this in one of his home letters. Writing 
from Gruny, he says: 

"The French people have lost a lot of their grouch since our 
bunch arrived on the scene. You can't look anywhere without 
seeing some of us and we're always singing, laughing, yelling 
from house to house and having a good time while working. 
Naturally enough it has loosened the natives up considerably. 
But the best thing to see is the way the children have relaxed 
since school has started again after being closed for three years. 
They come out of school in the evenings — all the little girls with 
their hair braided and black dresses; and the boys with little 
gingham aprons covering them from shoulder to knee, except 
that they only button to the waist in back; and with little 
blue hats built on the same model as those of the soldiers of 
France — they come out of school and actually play, pulling 
each other in carts, etc. When we first came nothing like that 
was ever seen." 

Another interesting picture is given in a story which had 
wide circulation during the war and which presents an early 
incident in the Quaker reconstruction work: 

Into one of the ruined villages of France, razed and desolated 
by the Germans in their retreat, says the World Outlook, came 
one day a party of the "Men in Gray," the Friends, or Quakers, 
of England, who, although their religion will not permit them 
to fight, are spending their strength to restore the ravages of 
fighting. 

In that village lived Marie, who in the pleasant days before 
the war had dwelt happily with her father and mother, her old 
grandmother and baby brother, in a comfortable red-roofed cot- 
tage. Now the father was at the front, the cottage was burned, 
and the lonely, frightened, half-starved family of four had taken 
refuge in the corner of a cellar. 

When Marie saw the "Men in Gray" she took courage. She 



220 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

had heard of the wonderful things done by those quiet English- 
men with the red and black star on their sleeves. Moreover, she 
was rich. She had six sous, and was therefore in a position to 
undertake a real estate negotiation'. 

"Maman," she said to her mother, "would not the 'Men in 
Gray' build us a cottage for my six sous'?" 

"Non, non," said the mother. 

But Marie persisted. "I will ask them," she announced. 

"You must not troiuble them. They wbuld laugh at you," the 
weary, sad mother told the little girl ; but Marie had the dauntless 
spirit of the women of France, and she was tired of the dark, 
damp cellar, where Grandmere coughed all night, and where there 
was no furniture, only rags to lie on. So with her six sous 
tight in her hand, she stole forth and sought the "Men in Gray." 

"Sir," she said to the one who met her, "could you build a 
cottage with a living-room, kitchen and bed-room for Grandmere, 
maman, my brother and me"? Could you do it for six sous? See, 
I have the money." She opened her hand and showed the coins. 
"Is it enough?" 

The tall Friend never smiled. "Quite enough," he said; "in 
fact, I think it can be done with four sous. We will build it 
at once." 

Marie got her cottage, a comfortable shelter, with beds and all 
necessaries in it, and when everything was complete the "Man 
in Gray" collected the four sous with all the formality of com- 
pleting a large transaction. 

In a world where so many humans seemed to have turned into 
devils, doing things that we supposed human beings had climbed 
far above, incidents like these are very cheering. They are an 
earnest that when pea^ee has returned not only will the desolated 
regions be restored as well as modem skill and labor can restore 
them-, but the work will be done with gentleness and with tact. 

Few of the men v^^ere trained builders — ^^indeed, the ma- 
jority were college bred fop some more mental profession, — 



BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 221 

and the picturesque old roofs had shaky lath foundations 
underneath their charming gables. 

"If there is anything more discouraging than to repair an old 
shrapnel-ruined slate roof I don't know it; your ladder in the 
first place, although the roofs have a very steep pitch, seems to 
break as many slates as it touches, and as soon as you begin on a 
hole it opens up in a tremendously impressive way. Then it is 
ver}^ slow work to slip slates under others and make them tight, 
for the sheathing is stuck full of rusty old nails that have held up 
slate before, and one's fingers suffer. But there is a great sat- 
isfaction in making somebody comfortable for the winter, and 
I hope I can do a decent job for this poor old lady. She has 
two sons and a grandson fighting and lives by herself, and is a 
most bustling and stirring person. . . . Like everyone else, she 
has a bomb-proof shelter constructed in her front yard, and 
very little else but her cat, her goat, and the ruins of a fine 
bam. 

"... I hope to make a water-tight roof, but the cold, the rain 
and the early darkness all combine to make it a very mean job. 

"Moreover, of course, we have to do a good many menial jobs 
to keep the place going. Yesterday, for instance, E. Z. and I 
put in the whole day sawing and chopping wood to cook by. . . . 
We take it in turns to get breakfast, getting up at 5 or 5:30 
and making porridge, tea and coffee, which is served at seven 
o'clock." 

As for food : 

"We generally have a good, generous soup, and vegetables — 
potatoes, peas, macaroni, tomatoes, — and a filling pudding. Some- 
times we can get meat. 

"Yesterday I went out to glaze some windows for our cook's 
liouse. All the glass was gone and she had taken down the 
frames. All French windows are casement, opening inward. She 
had patched up a window with German wire glass and a small 
single sash, probably German. Well, of course, the first thing 



222 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

I did was to put in the glass, then I tore down her patchwork 
and hung the sash, but alas, they wouldn't shut — they had been 
in the weather too long and had warped so they interfered with 
each other. It was too much like cabinet work for me, and I 
had to call for help, and we were two hours planing and fitting 
to get them shut. Most of the time we were surrounded by 
children, counting in English, German and French, and discussing 
the coming Christmas party. . . . To-day I went back and put 
up the cook's patchwork window in another room. . . . After 
that I spent the rest of the day glazing the sash in a soldier's 
house which is at present entirely deserted, but whenever he gets 
leave he comes home to patch it up as he wants his wife to live 
in it as soon as possible. It is not badly damaged, but needs 
a good deal of plastering and glazing. Glazing is rather ticklish 
work, as the glass furnished by the government is very thin and 
brittle and is not cut to exact measure but generally is just 
enough too large to make it necessary to trim the wood as you 
can hardly cut a thin strip off the glass. Then you dull your 
chisel on concealed nails. Also the old frames are warped and 
out of line, and hard to fit. This soldier's house is a poor man's 
house, the walls being one layer of brick plastered on the outside 
with mud and straw, with a thin coat of plaster over that. He 
is trying to get two rooms in order and let the rest go for the 
present, and I was able to get all the panes of glass in but one 
to-day." 

Opportunities for Relief work often presented themselves 
to the builders, getting into close touch as they did with the 
lives of the people among whom they worked. 

"I find our washerwoman is absolutely destitute. She owns a 
stove, and is living in one room with two little girls. The room 
is about ten by fifteen. They have only the stove, one bed, and 
the clothes they stand in. The furniture belonged to a woman 
who is now a prisoner in Germany. A small pension as a soldier's 
widow is the main source of support. The mother is a hard- 
working, honest woman. I have undertaken to provide her with 



BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 223 

an outfit after talking her ease over with the Maire, and last 
night after she had washed the dishes I had her in my room, 
and with the help of a dictionary we drew up a list of what 
she ought to have. You should have seen the delight of the 
little girl at the thought of having a separate bed. The three of 
them are sleeping in one bed now. . . . The mother is very 
hopeful about the future, and hopes to get a decent house to 
live in. At present, as she owns no house or land, we can't 
do anything for her in the way of more commodious shelter." 

The co-operation and friendliness shown in this account 
and many others as existing between the local Maire 
(Mayor) and the Friend workers is a very happy feature of 
the work. As one boy writes : 

"The more I see of the Maire the more I am inclined to trust 
him and rely on his advice. He doesn't seem to play any fav- 
orites, and he rejoices with the people that we help, although 
he does want us to do some work for him. His house is in 
good condition, but his barn wants repairing; we of course 
have to devote ourselves to houses until we get roofs tight 
and every one in the Commune at least in a dry and fairly 
tight house." 

The severe winter of 1917 was hard on the building work. 
The sections of the maisons demontahles became warped by 
the cold before they could be erected, ice and snow had to 
be cleared away from the scene of labor in the discouraging 
gray morning before work could start ; we read of the wash- 
house floor being covered with ice to greet early bathers, 
and icicles forming on unwary moustaches that poked out 
from sleeping-bags. One odd job that turned up was a 
result of the cold weather : 

"Last week was about as cold as any weather we have had in 
Philadelphia. It snowed about a foot on the 16th, and began 



224 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

to freeze hard, and it didn't melt a bit until last night. . . . 
We were asked to make a snow-plow by the Maire, and after 
strenuous work a very good plow was made and put into operation. 
The Maire sent three horses harnessed tandem and two men to 
drive them, and followed the plow all round the village on foot." 

Charming ''fathers of the village" these French Maires. 

Stories of the building work in the villages could be mul- 
tiplied^ but they all bear on much the same details as have 
been already indicated. Hard work, becoming more skilled 
as time went on, warm friendship, ripening with the days, 
help and comradeship in regions where these had become 
rare. 

"The gay way," says one, "in which any one refers to any 
difficulty or privation they ask you to share with them — 'Ca ne 
fait rien, c'est la guerre,' is very misleading. They don't con- 
sider the war gaily or joyously, it is a very serious and terrible 
state of affairs and cannot end too quickly and every one will 
say so, although no one has any formula for putting an end to it. 
Mme. Varley, whose house I had just finished, loaded my pockets 
up with apples that came from Normandy last summer, and very 
good they were, and then when I was leaving she tried to force 
a five franc note on me, and I had a terrible time persuading her 
that I couldn't take it. I had to put it on the backs of her 
hands and let it fall to the floor. My French is inadequate for 
such a situation, but we parted good friends all the same." 

Those who were undertaking the perhaps less physically 
exacting but more monotonous work of manufacture at the 
Dole and Ornans centers, did not neglect their opportuni- 
ties to get into friendly touch with the people among whom 
they lived. Many of them took French lessons in different 
families, and so obtained entrance into the family circle and 
were presently able to share its pleasures and difficulties. 



BUILDING AND RECONSTRUCTION 225 

And Christmas parties for the children proved a wonderful 
opener of hearts, here as elsewhere. 

In conclusion, it may be illuminating to quote "the star 
poem of the star grouch" as a summary of the difficulties 
with which the workers had to contend, the view of the 
men themselves as to what made their work worth while, 
the view of a French newspaper writer on the same sub- 
ject, and the view of the American Red Cross. 

THE STAR GROUCH REMARKS 
The stopped-up drain; 

The smoky flue; 
The inside pain; 

Too much to do. 

The icy walk; 

The early night; 
The foreign talk; 

The lack of light. 

The air that's damp ; 

The homely daughter; 
cold hard world : 

cold hard water. 

If that is not graphic and cheerful grumbling, what is? 
As to what they thought made the work worth while : 

"You know, I think it would have been worth while for us to 
be there if we had never hung a single slate or mended one 
smashed wall. At first the people were suspicious of us; we 
were foreigners, and they didn't like us; then they were indif- 
ferent; but now we're real friends. . . 

"I think the thing that brings the little catch to the throat 
most often is to be greeted with loving smiles and handclasps 



226 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

in villages in which one would imagine inhabitants could never 
smile again." 

Carleton MacDov^^ell, one of our American ''boys/' has 
well summed up the spirit of this w^ork : 

"We went to mend houses; but the reason we wanted to mend 
houses was that it would give us a chance to try to mend hearts. 
Much of our work on the houses has been lost; but I do not 
believe that any amount of cannonading will break down what- 
ever influence we had on these people's hearts. We cannot say 
how nmich cheerfulness, hope and love we brought them — surely 
some reached them. I believe it possible that even now, when 
their troubles are keener than ever, their experience with us boys 
may somehow be giving them a little mental comfort. However 
that may be, the whole perplexing question of our coming will 
remain in the back of their minds. From time to time it will 
claim attention until finally a light dawns, until they finally realize 
why we came — ^why we crossed the ocean voluntarily, why we 
worked without pay, why in order to do this we were willing to 
leave our homes and our professions and take up jobs we never 
tried before. And when this answer once comes to them it will 
never be forgotten ; in the intimate traditions of these families will 
be handed down the account of the little group of men who worked 
for strangers because of their belief in the Great Brotherhood." 




THE VERDUN AREA 



acALi or KiLOMCTfe" 

r ■ ■ I . r f 



SCALE or MILti 

4 — J — T — f — t — I — t — ^ — H^ 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE VERDUN PROJECT 

Never before in the long military history of the human 
race has there been such fighting as that which took place 
on the hills and in the valleys around Verdun. It seems 
inconceivable that men of flesh and blood could endure such 
deeds and experiences as those which marked this amazing 
campaign. One who has been over Hill 304 and "Dead 
Man ^s Hill ' ' and has seen the havoc wrought there wonders 
whether fear of death in human breasts is really any longer 
a fact. In any case an unparalleled slaughter of men and 
an equally unparalleled maiming of bodies occurred here, 
and in the fearful process the trees and even the soil of the 
land were shot and torn into hopeless ruin. The northern 
portion of the Argonne Forest suffered in similar fashion, 
while the strip of country on both sides of the main line of 
trenches running north of Verdun through the forest was 
made a desolate waste, the trees being shot often into frayed 
wood fiber. This region, with the less destroyed sections to 
the south of the trench line, our mission was officially asked 
to "reconstruct." 

The workers of our mission in the Mame had pushed 
north their reconstruction "invasion" wherever there was 
an opening for them and had done a large amount of work 
even as far up toward the line as Jubecourt and Auzeville. 
Dr. Earp and Dr. Hinde had been pioneers in this region 
of desolation. This service in the villages near Verdun had 
deeply impressed the Sous-Prefet of the district as well as 

227 



228 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

the peasants. He knew that it would be important to have 
workers ready as soon as the region should be cleared of the 
forces of destruction and, with this in mind, he made a re- 
markable proposal to the mission as early as December, 1917. 
It was a call to Friends to take the sole charge of reconstruc- 
tion and relief work in the district lying between Verdun 
and Clermont-en-Argonne. The boundaries were eventu- 
ally greatly extended, as we shall see. 

In his letter to the committee the Sous-Prefet says : 

"With the financial assistance of the government, the society 
might establish at the base of this zone two receiving centers, 
say, at La Grange Lecomte, near Auzeville, and at Glorieux, in 
the suburbs of Verdun. These would include accommodation 
for members of the society, a hospital-infirmary, a canteen, dor- 
mitories, a nursery-school, and an office. The canteen would be 
arranged to feed the refugees on their return, materials being 
supplied by the government; and the dormitories would offer 
accommodations to such people as have no other shelter. The 
nursery-school, established for the benefit of the children belong- 
ing to the families so assisted, would be carried on by one or more 
members of the Public Education Staff. The refugees thus sup- 
ported in a receiving center could be employed, partly for wages, 
and partly as a quid pro quo, as helpers in the necessary work 
of the center, or in work on the land adjoining. 

BACK TO THEIR HOMES 

"The society having established these centers and opened them 
in readiness for the return, would afterwards organize visits 
from the heads of families to the places with which they were 
concerned. This would be of special importance from the point 
of view of morale, inasmuch as individuals would not be alone 
when they first set foot again on their former property. So ex- 
tensive is the devastation that they might otherwise be tempted 
to retrace their steps to exile in utter discouragement. 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 229 

'The society would thus help the people to make decisions, 
would inspire them with a spirit of resolution, and create as 
between its own workers and the refugee families a sort of 
association in view of the great undertaking before them. Inves- 
tigation should be made both as to the intentions of the families 
themselves, and the help available for them in the way of repairs 
to damaged property, temporary houses, equipment, implements 
and furniture. The chief aim in view should be that the family, 
in returning to their property, should not depend upon the help 
of the government for more than a limited time. There must be 
no such thing as centers of misery. 

INVESTIGATIONS REQUIRED 

"As this is an agricultural country, the state of the ground 
will need to be taken into account. If tillage is impossible for 
years to come, in view of the presence of unexploded bombs and 
the general upturning of the soil, the cultivation of sheep, goats 
or pigs on the waste lands might be suggested as an alternative. 
Inquiry should also be made as to the possibility of starting 
centers of home industry, or introducing toy and lace making, 
basket-weaving, embroidery, or leather work. The methods of 
industry anterior to the war will not be able to be resumed, 
hand-work and material being absent. It will be necessary to 
group the inhabitants of the same place, to coordinate their 
activity, and to lead them on unconsciously to the idea of coopera- 
tion, starting at first with cooperative supply in order to get rid 
of the middle-man. The people will get hold of the idea of the 
benefit of such a method, and will be led on towards cooperative 
production. 

THE RESUMPTION OF INDUSTRY 

"But the task of the society cannot end there. It will have 
got over the first two stages in the work of the return, having 
welcomed the family back to the devastated region, watched over 
it with solicitude, guided and encouraged it. Thanks to this per- 
suasion, ruined buildings will be reconstructed and life begun 



230 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

again among the ruins. Who then should be better able than 
the society to take the third step — that of reconstruction itself 
and the resumption of productive labor? With this object in 
view the receiving centers should become productive centers. A 
new form of collaboration should come into force between the 
society and the government, the former undertaking to start in- 
dustries in the receiving centers and workshops in the vicinity, 
and in the neighborhood of the railways." 

The Sous-Prefet proposed that the temporary houses of 
the district should be built of ' ' concrete, ' ' composed of the 
pulverized ruins of the former houses mixed v^ith cement 
or slag. This plan of construction fell through when the 
time came to build and the villages were finally supplied 
with our usual demountables. This call came just before 
New Year and before any steps could be taken to fulfil 
it, the great spring ''drive" of 1918 upset all plans and 
delayed any thought of rebuilding the sections near the 
trench lines. The plan, however, never died out of mind. 
It was always a goal toward which the mission worked, 
and a year from the time when it was first made, it was 
on the point of becoming operative. 

In May of 1918, when the dark had not begun to be 
broken with streamers of light, a member of the mission 
wrote: "The Verdun work makes a deep appeal to all of 
us. We have been invited to undertake not a piece of mere 
relief work, but the reconstruction of the social fabric of 
many villages. There will be a wide scope for building, 
relief, agriculture and medical work, while the organiza- 
tion of cooperative concerns, agricultural and industrial, in 
conjunction with the peasants, the workers and the French 
authorities, will open up a new sphere of activity to our 
workers. Our future can thus be concentrated. . . . May 
we not hope, too, that the friendship and sympathy built up 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 231 

between our men and women — British and American — and 
the French people with whom they work will live on after 
the war is over, and form a living bond of understanding 
and fellowship between the three peoples." 

The summer with its great events came and went and 
the autumn brought the armistice with something like the 
dawn. At once the Yerdun project took on a fresh prom- 
ise. The November executive meeting in Paris was largely 
occupied with a consideration of plans for the "invasion" 
of the northern area. The ''concrete" houses were still 
a vital subject and plans were developing for the forma- 
tion of cooperative stores to save the peasants from the 
''gold rushes" of selfish profiteers. T. Edmund Harvey, 
with his usual insight said: "To spread the spirit of 
cooperation and leave behind us cooperative institutions 
that will be more than ephemeral, will be time well spent. ' ' 

In early January the work in the "Yerdun area" was 
vigorously begun and the ten thousand refugees who were 
eager to return were looking to us in hope that home was 
once more to be real for them. The large farm with its 
extensive buildings which constituted the estate known as 
Grange-le-Compte was taken as headquarters of the mission 
and fitted up to house a large working force. Barracks 
had been left there by the American army which con- 
tributed materially to our welfare. It was conveniently 
located in reference to the area of work and from this center 
after March of 1919, the mission was managed and the lines 
of activity radiated out West, North and East, like the 
ribs of a fan. All the old departments except that of 
manufacturing were put into intensive operation, while a 
new feature, that of cooperative stores and the sale of 
the "Dumps" to be spoken of later, was introduced. 
These cooperative stores, managed by the department of 



232 SERVICE OP LOVE IN WAR TIME 

purchase and sales, did an immense business. During the 
six months from June to December the sales of farm sup- 
plies alone amounted to 560,786 francs and contained such 
items as the following: 18,000 chickens, 6,000 rabbits 
(which came too fast to be counted accurately), 460 goats, 
698 sheep, 229 pigs, 87 cattle, 41 horses, and 626 bee 
colonies, with 360 more to be delivered. 

The total sales in the cooperative stores for the seven 
months ending in July, 1919, amounted to more than 
800,000 francs. 

Even before Grange was ready with its central offices, 
little equipes of workers had been established in the ruined 
villages of the area. A center of relief was opened by a 
group of trained women workers at Ste. Menehould, a center 
of agriculture was started at Dombasle-en-Argonne, a unit 
of men had begun to repair the broken houses at Le Neu- 
four and an equipe of house builders, all five of them Hav- 
erford graduates, was installed in a shattered building at 
Neuilly. Jubecourt which was a tiny bit below the south- 
em edge of the new area was growing in considerable 
strength as a center of agriculture, repair of farm im- 
plements and breeding place for rabbits. This whole region 
belongs in the arrondissement of the Meuse, but I shall call 
it after the popular name associated with our original 
plan, ''the Verdun area," much of it lies in the ''Canton 
of Argonne" which is another familiar name for a section 
of this field. During the spring of 1919 the region was in 
the hands of the American army and American soldiers 
were quartered in many of the villages. Large numbers 
of German prisoners were also assigned to this section and 
were engaged primarily in rebuilding the roads. The 
American army had built a new railroad through the 
Argonne Forest and across the "area" to Verdun. At 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 233 

five depots there were piled enormous ''dumps" of material 
and supplies. This material covered many acres at each 
"dump" and consisted of lumber, bar-iron and steel, farm 
and road implements of every sort, miles upon miles of 
barbed wire and an almost indescribable melange of all ma- 
terial which might be useful in a modem war. J. Henry 
Scattergood who had a great part in working out the early 
plans for the joint mission had gone over again to France 
with me in December of 1918 and he remained after my re- 
turn. He had a feeling that these ' ' dumps ' ' might be very 
useful in our work and might be got from the army on rea- 
sonable terms. While Charles J. Rhoads and J. Henry Scat- 
tergood and I were making a tour of the **area" in January 
we visited the head military official of the district, situated 
at Dombasle, and asked him to consider the possibility of 
letting us have the ' ' dumps ' ' for our French work of relief. 
He was very favorable to the idea and at once opened com- 
munication with the officers who had charge of their dis- 
posal. During the following weeks J. Henry Scattergood 
devoted much of his time to this project, ably assisted in 
the undertaking by Charles Rhoads and others. There 
were many hitches and delays, much cabling, telegraphing, 
writing, and personal visiting, but finally an offer was made 
by the officials who had the matter in hand and after serious 
consideration it was accepted. We thus came into pos- 
session of a vast amount of reconstruction material, 
adapted for the needs of the work. There was, however, at 
the same time a great deal more which we could not use 
ourselves. With rare ability and quick action the capable 
men who had arranged the purchase proceeded to dispose 
of the extensive surplus. The railroads of the section 
agreed to carry it for us free of freight charges and the 
department of the French Government in charge of German 



234 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

prisoners let us have groups of them to sort and load the 
dump material. Sales, by agreement, could be made only 
within an area of fifty kilometers, but as it was offered at 
very low values, it sold rapidly, and was well disposed of. 
We had already established a large .capital fund to be used 
for financing the system of cooperative stores already re- 
ferred to. This capital fund had been furnished by large 
contributions from the London and Philadelphia offices. 
Into this fund the money from the sale of the ' ' dumps ' ' was 
put to be used over again in purchases for the cooperative 
business, and all that has accrued in this way will finally 
be put into permanent improvements for the benefit of the 
French people in the war zones. This sale of the ''dumps" 
and the system of cooperative stores proved to be one of 
the greatest of all our forms of assistance. It gave the re- 
turning refugees an opportunity to furnish their houses 
and to stock their farms at the lowest possible cost. It 
was supposed that the great stock of barbed wire in the 
** dumps" would be like "coals to Newcastle" since the 
whole world of the war-zone was one great entanglement, 
of barbed wire. But it was quickly discovered that this 
old rusty wire was useless. It could not be taken down 
from the entanglements and put up again where it was 
wanted without a great waste of time, nor could it be cut 
up and melted at advantage. In fact it was worse than 
worthless. The only thing to be done with it was to cut 
it up and bury it where the process of rust would some day 
eat it up. The result was that our barbed wire sold almost 
as well as though the armies had not left so much of it 
strung over the fields. 

The work with the German prisoners was a strange and 
interesting experience, both for our workers and for the 
prisoners themselves. They worked for us on their honor 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 235 

and so without guard. We agreed that if ever one of them 
escaped we would immediately return the entire group to 
the French authorities and cease to use them further. The 
prisoners were told this fact that if any one took advan- 
tage of the larger freedom which we gave them the work 
with us would come to an end. They promised to ''play 
fair" and to keep the terms, and they usually kept their 
word. We fed them and gave them good food. So much 
did they appreciate the dinners they got that they preferred 
to work on holidays when they might have rested, since 
if they worked they knew they would get a good dinner. 
They became much attached to the members of the mission 
with whom they worked and the whole effect of the arrange- 
ment was excellent. As the mission did not feel that it 
was quite right to use without pay the labor of men who 
were not free to volunteer but were held against their will 
it was decided to seek out in Germany the families of all the 
prisoners who had worked for us and to make these families 
a present large enough to cover our estimate of the value of 
the labor which we received, which has been done. 

In another way we were materially assisted in our later 
work by the interest and kindness of army officers. It 
had always been difficult to get a sufficient supply of motor 
cars and trucks for our service. In the spring of 1919 the 
officers in charge of the liquidation of army supplies in 
France gave us a free loan of all the cars and trucks we 
needed to finish up our work. There were nearly forty cars 
of various types in the loan. We were thus supplied with 
them free of all cost so long as we needed them for the 
mission. This generous assistance at once raised the effi- 
ciency of all our undertakings and enabled us to widen the 
sphere of activity. 

There were some forty villages in the area originally as- 



236 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

signed to us but tlie size of the area continually expanded 
as we worked. As soon as a village near the border of the 
area was ''reconstructed" the Maire of the adjoining vil- 
lage across the border was pretty sure to urge the heads 
of the mission to take charge of Ms village and then the 
next one beyond would come. In this way the work ex- 
tended far beyond our early expectation of its limits. It 
moved steadily north and northwest. In fact it reached 
out beyond the Meuse and went over into the department of 
Ardennes. Grand Pre and Chatel-Chehery and towns still 
farther north had units of the mission restoring their ter- 
rible wastes and desolations. Varennes, where Louis XVI 
and Marie-Antoinette were captured on their flight from the . 
French Revolution, a town full also of memories for Ameri- 
can soldiers, was one of our star centers. Montfaucon, 
headquarters of the German Crown Prince during the Ver- 
dun "drive," a town smashed to fragments in the later 
stages of the war, was another center of Quaker activity. 
Even Esnes, so badly destroyed that the signs standing 
among its ruins bore the words : ' ' This used to be Esnes, ' ' 
was helped back into life again. Boureuilles, hardly less 
spoiled than the two towns last named, and situated close to 
Vauquois, which was at least twice mined and blown actu- 
ally out of existence, had its band of workers. Sainte Mene- 
hould, which the American soldiers could never learn to 
pronounce, was a relief center both for the town and the 
surrounding district. Les Islettes, a little island of culti- 
vation in the heart of the Argonne Forest, had its equipe 
of Quaker workers. Seventy houses were built at Neuilly 
and the new town was officially named the '^Cite des Amis/' 
Eighty houses were built at Montfaucon amid the ruins of 
this ancient hiU town. 

A recent report from Wilmer J. Young shows conclu- 







^z-iA'4Mmi 



The Cite des Amis (Neuvilly) 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 237 

sively how much better off the villages of our ''area" are 
than are the other sections of the devastated zones. He 
says: 

"On a trip to the Somme not long ago, any idea that we had 
not been able to help our region was absolutely dispelled. On 
all of this trip of about 150 miles of the battle front, we saw 
no place at all where a small village like Neuilly had been built. 
A village of about 300 or 400 inhabitants before the war would 
have five or six families back instead of 70 or 80 as in our villages. 
Two cities of probably 20,000 or 30,000 inhabitants, which had 
been razed to the ground, and which we passed through, had 
possibly 100 or 150 houses each. In one of these cases the houses 
had been built by a big company, evidently to house its own 
workmen. There is no doubt that in the districts where we have 
done building, we have advanced the return of the French refu- 
gees en masse by at least one year." 

One of the most telling forms of help which the mission 
supplied consisted of building and managing canteens and 
hostels for the refugees who returned to their ruined vil- 
lages. They were thus provided with a place to eat and 
sleep while they were getting life started again in homes 
which were not ready for their inmates. The cooperative 
stores sold them glass to repair their windows in cases 
where the old houses were not beyond recovery, and here, 
too, in these stores, they could get cement, paint and white- 
wash for the inside walls. Wall paper also could be had 
and curtains for those who wanted to have the house look 
as it used to do. Nails — ^thanks to the ''dumps" — we had 
in plenty and these were indispensable to all returning 
exiles. 

Schools had not existed in these regions since the war 
first broke over their heads. The mission assisted the re- 
turned people in starting a school in every village as soon 



238 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

as the children got back to use it, and these schools were 
furnished with necessary school-supplies out of the coopera- 
tive stores. Over ninety schools thus received supplies of 
pens, paper, crayons and other needed material. All school 
libraries had been annihilated. We proceeded to put a 
small library in every school in our area. Besides this an 
excellent library of one thousand volumes was bought for 
Clermont, to be used both in the town and throughout the 
canton. This splendid work was under the oversight of 
Edith Moon. 

The soil of this whole Verdun region was poor even be- 
fore the devastation came to it. The trenches and shell 
holes left it seven times worse than in its former estate. 
But it was ''home" to a great number of peasants and they 
loved it with such a passion that no other land could take its 
place for them. One reason why this area especially ap- 
pealed to our mission was that the rich and easy areas 
could take care of themselves. Sooner or later recovery 
and reconstruction were sure to come where the returns 
from the land were abundant. But unless help came 
early nothing could save the sterner regions which skirted 
the Argonne and lay in the storm belt of trench warfare. 
Henceforth Verdun and Argonne will always be associated 
with the Quakers. The scenes of the world's greatest 
fighting and the men who could not fight — with guns and 
bayonets — are indissolubly united. In the summer of 
1919 the work in the Meuse and the Ardennes reached its 
height. Many forms of relief slowed down and came to an 
end soon after the armistice was sig-ned. Our work, how- 
ever, expanded when the fighting stopped. The men who 
had been unable to do reconstruction before the war was 
over now were eager to do their part in the labor of love and 
those who had already been in the mission wanted to go 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 239 

on with their work, since they were not in it just because 
they had to be in it, but rather because it was the best 
expression they knew how to give of their faith and spirit. 
After the middle of the summer the work naturally tapered 
off. The people were back in their villages, they had homes 
to live in, their harvests were gathered, their communities 
established and life was in some sense reorganized. Charles 
Rhoads, William Biddle, Henry Scattergood, Ralston 
Thomas, Joseph Haines, Frederick J. Libby and many 
other members of the American group who had had an 
important part in its direction felt that they could return 
to America now and leave the work in other hands. 
Frank Shaw was chosen Executive Secretary to succeed 
Wilfrid Shewell. Wilmer J. Young was selected to suc- 
ceed Charles J. Rhoads as head of the American body of 
workers. James Norton, Vincent Nicholson, Leslie Heath, 
Weston Howland, all men who had been thoroughly tried 
and tested in the formative experience of the work, became 
prominent leaders in the finishing period of it. The prob- 
lems still remained complex and difficult, for in some re- 
spects it is a harder task to direct a closing operation than 
to steer an opening one. The drive and enthusiasm of the 
forward-looking group are maintained with great difficulty 
when the winding up process is underway. To see old 
workers and companions withdrawing to go home works 
subtly on the mind of those who stay behind to finish the 
slowly contracting job. It must be said, however, that the 
spirit of the Mission in France has remained to the 
end. I am writing on the last day of 1919. The workers 
have been coming home in a steady stream for many weeks, 
but so far as one can tell from conversation and letters 
much of the old time fire is left. According to the latest 
reports, relief in some form or degree has been given by 



240 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Friends to 1,666 French villages and over 46,000 families 
have been assisted. The Mission has planted 25,000 trees, 
mostly fruit trees, in 'Hhe Verdun area," five trees per 
family, and many communal trees. 

Of the group still on the field, more than half are eager 
to go, when their work in France is done — and it will prac- 
tically close in six or eight weeks — ^to one of the new fields 
of labor and relief which have already opened in Serbia, 
Poland, Vienna and Germany. A spirit of service, an in- 
ternational outlook, a deep sympathy for aU who suffer 
have come to most of the workers in the French field and 
they will bear henceforth both in their souls and bodies the 
marks of their years of devoted labor in France. A French 
writer, in a Paris newspaper, commenting on the work of 
the Mission said not long ago, *'The Friends consider that 
the most beautiful form of intelligence is friendship.*' 
That has not been a conscious article of the Quaker creed, 
but the expression of friendship has been, I am sure, the 
deepest aspiration of all the best and truest workers and 
into it as into all their constructive activities has gone 
the best intelligence with which they were gifted. An 
American army officer who had seen the work and the work- 
ers in many places wrote home from Paris with enthusiasm : 

"Everywhere I go, whether up to the front or down to the 
Baby Show at Lyons, I always find the Quakers, and they are 
always the hardest working, simplest, most modest crowd in the 
place. They rarely do the big spectacular things, so they are 
not so much talked about as they should be. But when you get 
down to the people on the ground who know what's going on, 
you find everybody from top to bottom blessing the Quakers." 

The workers themselves have been extremely modest and 
humble, conscious of mistakes and failures rather than 
exalted by successes. They would regret to have trumpets 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 241 

sound their praises. They have not allowed their left hand 
to know what their right hand was doing. Cures have 
thanked God for them and have prayed His blessing upon 
them. Mayors of villages and towns have given them elo- 
quent addresses of appreciation. 

The following letter, which is a good sample of many 
similar expressions of appreciation, is from the widow of 
M. Paul Labosse who had been president of the Civil Tri- 
bunal of Nancy, Mayor of Clermont and Conseiller Gen- 
eral of the Meuse. Writing from Poitier to one of our 
workers, November 28th, 1919, after a visit to Clermont, 
she says: 

"I have just heard that you may be leaving Clermont about 
March next. I do not want to delay longer in teUing you of my 
admiration for your work. When I was at Clermont in October 
last I received hospitality in your house, but did not like to dis- 
turb you by expressing my thanks. I regret that I did not do it 
and now I want to tell you something of my feeling for your 
Mission so rich in the self-sacrifice, the understanding and dis- 
cretion of its members. May you be rewarded for the immense 
amount of good you have done for our country, for after five 
years of death you have brought it life. With the help you have 
given hope has sprung up again, even amongst those who, like 
myself, felt that it was no longer worth while to live. [She had 
been to see the grave of her son.] Infirm and half ruined I have 
nevertheless sought a temporary dwelling. 

"Allow me to thank you personally and particularly for the 
generosity with which your Mission rebuilt the large wing of 
the hospital at Clermont previously built by my husband. He 
loved his town passionately, the inhabitants would tell you so, 
and in thanking you I feel that I speak in his name. Receive 
these thoughts as the expression of a mind which would have 
known how to understand and appreciate you even better than 
I can do. 



242 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

'"You will probably only leave us to take new life elsewhere. 
How splendid is your Mission, how rich in generosity for your 
allies. Accept my kind regards, as well as my sincere gratitude." 

Mare touching still has been the joy of little children 
whose innocent faces spoke the fervor of their hearts. The 
workers have greatly prized these testimonies but they have 
always dwelt in their thought upon the littleness of the 
service compared to the trouble and woe of the country 
they tried to help. They rejoice most that they could per- 
manently build their love and devotion into one section of 
the land that suffered so much. I should Like to close this 
chapter with the words I spoke to a large group of them 
in Paris last winter : 

' ' Ever since I was a little child, the building of • cathe- 
drals has made me marvel — the way those men translated 
their faith into these glorious structures. Nobody ever 
built a cathedral; you cannot put your finger on the man 
who did it ; the man that started it was often dead before 
the first story was up. He dreamed a splendid dream, and 
died ; the cathedral went on. Every man in the whole city 
and every man about the city helped build; every woman 
and every child helped carry stones. Centuries went by; 
styles of architecture changed. The cathedral went on and 
every Christian went on building his faith into it like a 
martyr's flame turned to stone, ever rising, ever aspir- 
ing, expressing everywhere and always the highest aspirar 
tion they had for their faith. 

*' A great thing has come to us. Though I cannot be in 
a cathedral without having every fiber in me respond to 
the glory of the place, yet I would rather have part in this 
work we are doing than share in the building of a cathe- 
dral. This translation of Christianity is greater than any 



THE VERDUN PROJECT 243 

cathedral-builders ever made. It has come to you to put 
your lives into this. Two hundred years from now they 
will not remember your names, they will not have a roll on 
which every name is listed. But this thing which you are 
doing will never cease, for when you translate Love into 
Life, when you become organs of God for a piece of service, 
nothing can obliterate it. To-night I feel, as I did this 
morning in Notre Dame, an emotion that throbs through 
my whole being. Thank God we can have our little share 
in this age in translating the love of God into terms of 
human service and that we can fight, not with guns, not 
with bombs, but with the sword of the Spirit which is the 
word of God." 



CHAPTER XVII 

AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 

The work of reconstruction and relief in France is only 
a part — ^though it is a large part — of the service of love to 
suffering victims of war which American Friends have un- 
dertaken in the years 1917-1919. We sent a small group of 
workers to Russia even before we had completed our plans 
for the French Mission. These workers joined the English 
Friends who had already for some time been engaged in 
extensive work of relief among the hosts of refugees who 
had retreated before the invading German armies as they 
drove through Poland and Western Russia. The center 
of the Friends' work was at Buzuluk in the Samara 
Province. 

The American Unit, consisting of six women, — Anna J. 
Haines, Lydia Lewis, Esther White, Emilie Bradbury, 
Nancy Babb, and Amelia Farbiszewski — started for South- 
eastern Russia on the 29th of June, 1917, to join with 
English Friends who had already established an extensive 
mission of relief for refugees and civilians. They reached 
the field of their activities at the end of August where they 
divided their group, each one of the workers going to a 
different center of activity. These six centers were in vil- 
lages, separated by one or two days' travel in a springless 
cart or sledge from the main office, which was situated in 
Buzuluk, a town of about 15,000 inhabitants and one of 
the largest wheat depots on the Samara-Tashkent railroad. 

244 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 245 

Each of the villages in the surrounding country held a 
native farming population of about 4,000, and since the 
early part of the great war housed, in addition, a refugee 
population of from one to five hundred persons. Owing to 
two years' drought, famine conditions prevailed and the 
refugees, as consumers and non-producers, were very un- 
popular. Most of them were women, old men and children, 
as the young and middle-aged men were still in the army. 
The English Friends had already established a hostel in 
a huge manor house recently deserted by a rich tobacco 
merchant, where orphans, childless old people, and a few 
families in which the mothers were incapacitated for work, 
were given refuge (in all about 125 people) . In that village 
and in two others English doctors were established, taking 
the place of the Russian physicians who had gone to the 
front, leaving the civilian population without medical aid. 
Hospitals were opened and managed by English nurses. 
One doctor's district covered an area including 60,000 peo- 
ple, and many of his patients had two days' drive to reach 
him. The dispensary waiting-rooms presented interesting 
opportunities for racial study, as Tartars, Bashkirs, Kir- 
gheze, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Bulgarians, Mordvins, Serbs, 
Austrians, and German prisoners patiently waited their 
turn with Russian natives and refugees. Frequently 120 
patients would be seen in one morning. Diseases of all 
sorts abounded. Christmas Day found one sixteen-bed hos- 
pital filled with patients who had anthrax, hydatid cyst, 
typhus, typhoid, pneumonia, puerperal fever, diphtheria, 
tubercular bone, frozen feet, and lunacy. In two other 
villages where there was no doctor a visiting nurse made 
rounds every day and saw besides about fifty patients in 
the dispensary each morning. In addition to their dispen- 
sary and hospital duties and operations the doctors made 



246 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

many trips into the country to sick patients, and visits of in- 
spection and advice to villages where typhus, typhoid or 
small-pox epidemics had broken out. Special food was 
often given to patients who required better nourishment 
than they could afford to buy. 

Relief work other than medical was confined to the 
refugees. Work-rooms were established in six villages 
where at least one member of each refugee family was given 
employment, — spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing or em- 
broidering. About 500 women were on the pay-roll at one 
time in the various centers. As there was and is so great 
dearth of cloth in Russia these workshops were especially 
valuable not only in providing the wages which made food 
purchaseable by the working women, but they actually in- 
creased the amount of wearable cloth in that part of the 
country. In addition to clothing all refugees in the vil- 
lages where the members of the mission lived, free clothing 
distribution was made to all the refugees in 40 other villages 
in the same county, covering an area about 75 by 150 
miles in extent. 

These three activities, medical service for both natives 
and refugees, workshops as the form of relief most practical 
and productive of self-respect for able-bodied refugees, and 
a hostel for the incompetents, constituted the backbone of 
the service of Friends in Russia during 1916-17 and 1918. 
In addition there were numerous other closely allied but 
less extensive activities. When after the Bolshevik Revo- 
lution many of the soldier husbands, fathers and sons came 
home from the front the mission could not see them sit 
idle while their wives worked, so a labor bureau was started 
for men and positions found for many. 

Two years of drought and several years of commandeer- 
ing of food for the army had made such inroads on the 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 247 

local supply of grain that by the spring of 1918 the stock 
of seed was very low and poor. It could be purchased in 
small quantities from the Cossacks, two days' journey away, 
but at a cost prohibitive to the poorer peasants. To prevent 
worse famine the Quaker workers loaned several thousand 
dollars to the poorest of the native peasants for the purpose 
of re-stocking themselves with seed-wheat. A contributory 
cause for the poor harvests was the scourge of ''suzlicks," 
a muskrat-like animal which eats the young blades and later 
the ripened grain. One spring the mission paid a bounty 
on suzlick skins and received them by the hundreds of 
thousands. 

The lack of education, both academic and along the lines 
of useful trades, was one of the gravest results of the ab- 
normal life of the refugees, most of whom had come from 
neighborhoods where more attention was paid to trade edu- 
cation at least, than in the steppe region where they were 
now located. The children under direct charge of the 
Mission in the orphanage received, of course, good schooling 
under trained teachers. One winter the Friends arranged a 
special morning school for Oerman-speaking refugee chil- 
dren of one village who were not received in the native school. 
In the afternoon classes for all refugee children were held 
in shoe-making and c-arpentry. A more ambitious course 
was carried out in the town of Buzuluk for several months. 
Here a regular trade-school was established with well- 
equipped workshops in carpentry, tailoring and shoemaking 
for boys, and book-binding for girls. "Work came from the 
city government as well as from civilians and from the 
orphanage, and this trade-school was kept upon a self-sup- 
porting basis. 

The Bolshevik advance made it very certain that Buzuluk 
would fall into their hands, after which capture it was most 



248 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

improbable that the English or American governments 
would permit funds to be forwarded to the workers. With- 
out the financial means to carry on the work, the workers 
could be of little use in that part of Russia. They left on 
the last train from Samara and started to investigate the 
refugee situation in the Siberian railroad towns. At 
Omsk they found the most frightful conditions of disease, 
overcrowding and forced idleness. Here also they met 
the American Red Cross, short of workers but eager for 
fresh helpers, and they allied themselves with it for six 
months of important service. Two members of the mission, 
Theodore Rigg and Esther White succeeded in getting 
through to Moscow where they spent the winter of 1918-19. 
They devoted themselves to the task of saving large groups 
of children from starvation by taking them out of the 
city into country districts where they could secure food 
for them. 

The activities of the group in Siberia were more con- 
centrated in area than they had been in Samara, but they 
dealt with a greater number of people, there being about 
12,000 refugees in the city and suburbs who were touched 
in some way by the work. Disease was much more preva- 
lent than in the Buzuluk area. Epidemics of typhus, 
typhoid and scurvy flourished during the winter and spring 
as well as much pneumonia, small-pox, and tuberculosis. 
Their investigations showed that amongst the 12,000 refu- 
gees whose homes were visited, about 3,000 lived in summer 
barracks with dirt floors utterly unfit for the winter tem- 
perature which fell to 71° F. below zero; 2,500 lived in 
miserable dugouts in the ground almost without light and 
ventilation; 500 lived in freight cars, and the remaining 
6,000 in all sorts of poor dwelling-places, from cattle pens 
to the corridors of public office buildings. One out of 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 249 

every twelve persons was found acutely iU with some dan- 
gerous communicable disease. Four thousand five hun- 
dred persons were recommended to receive clothes, and 700 
women were suggested as needing home work to keep their 
families or to supplement their husbands' earnings. The 
help based on these investigations took much the same form 
as had been found practical in our earlier experience: 
labor bureaus for adult healthy workers able to leave home, 
hand-work in the home for women with little children and 
without male support, clothing distributions, medical at- 
tendance, schools and orphanages. Disinfecting on a large 
scale was done in the barracks. 

The unrest in Siberia due to the political conditions made 
work both for the refugees and for many equally poor 
natives most difficult. But the possibilities for permanent 
reconstruction, both spiritual and material, are perhaps 
greater in Russia than in any other country. 

Some of the members of the Service Committee, even in 
the early stages of its work, carried on their hearts a deep 
concern to do some real constructive service for Serbia. 
The story of suffering which came to us from those who had 
been in that distressed country moved us deeply. "We had, 
however, for many months all we could do to carry forward 
what we had undertaken in Finance and Russia. It seemed 
wise to keep concentrated and to put our united efforts into 
the great task which had been laid on our hands. When 
the Russian work was closed by conditions over which we had 
no control, and when we saw that the Mission in France 
would call for only a limited period of activity, our thought 
turned strongly again toward Serbia. A very interesting 
Serbian official who was in this country in the autumn of 
1918, M. Stoykovitch, attended a session of the Service 
Committee and vividly pictured to us the woes of his 



250 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

country and called upon us to undertake a definite piece 
of agricultural reconstruction not far from Nish.. The ap- 
peal made a deep impression and a special committee was 
appointed, with President W. W. Comfort of Haverf ord 
College as chairman of it, to study the problems and to 
propose a line of action. This committee spent much time 
and effort investigating the situation. They received the 
most conflicting accounts of conditions in Serbia and they 
got a great variety of opinions upon the lines of relief which 
were most urgently needed. It was finally decided to send 
out a small commission of Friends to study the problem on 
the field. J. Lawrence Lippincott of Riverton, New Jer- 
sey and Alvin Wildman of Selma, Ohio, were chosen for this 
important service. The committee decided to send out a 
small band of workers with the commission so that there 
might be no delay in starting operations when once the plan 
of work was formulated, and it was further decided to ap- 
propriate $40,000 to purchase supplies for the use of this 
unit, which was to take up its practical task as soon as the 
field of activity was selected by the commission. 

The commission sailed from New York in July, 1919, ac- 
companied by a small band of workers and followed a few 
days later by a second band, making fifteen in all. The 
unit consisted of the following workers: Cecil Franklin 
Cloud of Ivor, Va., Elsa M. Eliot of Pittsburgh, Pa., Sam- 
uel E. Eliot of Pittsburgh, Pa., Philip William Furnas of 
Indianapolis, Ind., Andrew R. Pearson of Swarthmore, Pa., 
Arthur J. Rawson of Lincoln, Va., Lor eta O. Rush of Fair- 
mount, Ind., Antoinette E. C. Russell of Philadelphia, Pa., 
Elwood D. Thomasson of Springfield, Iowa, and William 
H. Wolfram of Boston, Mass. Lawrence Lippincott and 
Alvin Wildman made a careful study of the various relief 
agencies operating in Serbia, they consulted with authori- 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 251 

ties and experts, and they worked out their plans for our 
form of service. Housing was plainly one of the great 
needs in the face of oncoming winter. In the region as- 
signed to us in the Toplica Valley the houses had been 
largely destroyed and the inhabitants, i.e. women and 
children, for the men were not yet back, were living in 
rude summer shelters. 

Our little band of workers had two hundred Bulgarian 
prisoners put under their care and direction for house- 
building work. They also received a supply of rough lum- 
ber and fifty mules to do the work of transportation. The 
prisoners proved to be good willing workers, responsive to 
kind treatment and ready to restore what they once de- 
stroyed. Besides carrying on the house-building operations 
it was decided to open and manage an orphanage for the 
destitute children of the region. A large farm with ex- 
tensive buildings was secured at Lescovatz. The buildings 
were reorganized and made ready for a numerous group 
of children, and a medical dispensary connected with the 
orphanage was provided for the district. The work is 
progressing and is bringing most needed relief to the sec- 
tion of Serbia that has fallen to our care. 

Throughout the whole period of the war English Friends 
had devoted much care and attention to the enemy aliens 
who were held in the internment camps in Great Britain 
and to their needy families. This work, which was carried 
on by the "Emergency Committee," was, of course, un- 
popular and often misunderstood, but it was a beautiful 
form of human relief and aroused the sympathy and inter- 
ested support of those who understood its loving and un- 
selfish spirit. It received some financial assistance from 
America, and a small attempt was made by Friends in this 
country to do a similar work among the Germans and Aus- 



252 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

trians interned here. In the clash of arms such waves of 
hate are generated that everybody who belongs even re- 
motely to the enemy peoples is supposed to be himself an 
enemy and is therefore treated as an outcast to be shunned 
by everybody. It seems difficult to remember, under such 
circumstances, how many innoeent sufferers there are and 
how tragic are the experiences of those who are free from 
all complicity in wrong-doing but who have been caught 
in the great net spread for really dangerous enemy aliens. 
Friends could not forget these innocent sufferers and they 
knew, furthermore, that there were very many persons, 
even in the enemy countries as well, who were not enemies 
in act or spirit, who were not responsible for the war, who 
did not approve of barbarities, and who were eagerly pray- 
ing for the tragedy to come to an end so that men and 
women and children might once more live. 

The Friends who thus kept alive their human sympathies 
and humanitarian instincts were not ' ' pro-German. ' ' They 
did not approve at all of German military aims, policies, 
or methods. They knew that only tragedy could come as 
the bitter fruit of the theory of life which had controlled 
the military party in Germany. But all the more for that 
reason they travailed in sorrow and pain for those who 
though innocent had to tread the wine-press of agony with 
those who were guilty. The first real assistance of im- 
portance which Friends were able to give to the ^nemy 
peoples in their own country was in the city of Vienna. 
The tragedy of ''the middle empires" culminated in this 
city, once the gayest in Europe. A large number of 
causes — political, economic and sociological, and psycho- 
logical no doubt as well — united to produce the climax of 
catastrophe in this center of art and music and scientific 
achievement. When English Friends first came to Vienna 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 253 

in May of 1919 they were appalled at the sight of suffering 
which met them. It appeared in the most harrowing form 
in the condition of the underfed children, and therefore the 
work which they began at once to organize had to do pri- 
marily with saving the children. Dr. Hilda Clark made 
the following report of the conditions : 

''What I find is that sixty per cent, of their children 
have severe rickets, and hardly one is free from the slighter 
degrees. No wonder that the hospitals and dispensaries are 
all over-crowded with cases of rickets — no wonder the tu- 
berculosis rate keeps rising. The future of these children 
is either to die of some trifling childish ailment in the win- 
ter, to become the victims of chronic tuberculosis or to grow 
up crippled and deformed. Even the slighter degrees of 
deformity, due to rickets, will in women produce difficulty 
and disaster in childbirth. 

''The full extent of the disaster that has befallen the 
children of Vienna is not realized by many, even of those 
who visit here. Cases of tuberculosis and rickets can be 
seen in any hospital in England, but one must point out 
that the cases of 'late rickets' in children over three years 
old were almost unknown till now. The increase in the 
number of cases cannot easily be demonstrated until the 
death rate shows it — and the children do not die of rickets 
alone. 

' ' The children of one to five years are seldom seen in the 
streets for they can hardly toddle, and unless you undress 
them and ask their ages you would not realize what had 
happened. Yet many of these children can be cured quite 
quickly if fresh milk can be given, 'and even the bad cases 
are often cured with cod liver oil. The distribution of 
milk and fats among this class of child would do more to 
prevent the increase of the death rate and the development 



254 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

of rickets and tuberculosis than any other measure, and 
would, in my opinion, have a most far-reaching effect on the 
future of the race. Extra nourishment is also needed for 
the mothers during pregnancy and lactation to prevent the 
infant mortality from continuing to rise. ' ' 

From the first the work of relief was planned with marked 
intelligence and was characterized by boldness and vigor. 
The American Committee was asked to cooperate in the 
Vienna relief work which we did by furnishing workers 
who had already been trained in France and who were 
well qualified for meeting the new emergency. We also 
appropriated $25,000 to assist in purchasing supplies. 
The work as planned by Dr. Hilda Clark, whose ''concern" 
it was, included a system of Infant Welfare Relief Centers 
where milk, cocoa, and other child foods were distributed 
for the mal-nourished children. It included also an organi- 
zation for visiting homes and hospitals and for assisting 
both private and public institutions, so that they might get 
the supplies which were most important for saving the 
children's lives. In connection with this work it was soon 
found necessary to perfect an arrangement for securing 
pure milk which, due to the separation of Vienna from its 
natural food sources, had become extremely scarce. By 
unceasing effort and no little spirit of venture the Friends 
induced the municipality of Vienna to buy from the country 
districts three hundred cows and to bring them to Vienna 
where the Friends agreed to keep them fed and to get the 
milk applied where it was most needed. They imported 
five thousand dollars' worth of linseed oil cake from 
America to be used as intensive food for the cows. On this 
plan it is estimated that a child can be supplied with milk 
for six months at a cost of $4.50. 

Another form of relief on a very large scale was the dis- 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 255 

tribiition of clothing sent for the purpose from England 
and America. The little babies were being wrapped in 
paper, and the boys and girls were going about in clothes 
made of coarse potato bags and other similar substitutes for 
cloihing. From the Quaker centers of relief a very large 
number of children and others have been supplied with 
warm and comfortable clothes, which made them feel as 
though life was beginning anew. 

Almost more difficult was the problem of fuel. The ration 
of coal assigned for each family in Vienna for the entire 
winter was about seventeen hundred pounds. Even that 
meager amount has not been actually furnished. Street 
cars were forced to stop running, manufacturing became 
impossible, and the city was threatened with a complete 
paralysis of functions. Frederick Kuh, one of our Ameri- 
can workers who was transferred from the French field 
for service in Austria, writes: "On the outskirts of Vienna, 
as the train draws into the metropolis, one sees hundreds 
of factories with every gaunt, towering chimney dormant — 
not a puff of smoke visible at a moment when, as never be- 
fore, smoke, fire, production, the means to live, are all 
essential. Coal has become a myth of ante-bellum days. 
"What untold hardships absence of coal has already caused 
are without end. The trees in the beautiful parks of 
the city and suburbs have been cut down to supply emer- 
gency fuel, while many a home has consumed its furniture 
to cook the scanty meals for the family. Friends have re- 
sorted to various expedients for relieving the suffering 
from cold, though they have, of course, been able to help 
only in a limited way. They have brought some supplies 
of coal from the coal fields in their motor cars and they 
have at least helped the hospitals to maintain a reasonable 
amount of heat*" 



256 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

A special correspondent to the Manchester Guardian, 
who went out to study the tragedy and to report upon the 
methods of relief, wrote the following account which was 
published in the above-named newspaper under date of 
December 26th, 1919 : 

^'What the Friends Relief Mission means to this sorrow- 
ful city (Vienna) in which since last May it has been 
working, only tim*e can completely show. One catches 
hints of its wonderful value here and there. They are 
to be found at hospitals and clinics, where suffering people 
give a grateful welcome to any one wearing the red-star 
badge. They are to be found, too, in the respect with 
which members of the mission are everywhere treated. To 
have saved hundreds of little children from a diseased life 
of utter misery is a beautiful thing, but it is far from 
being the only or maybe even the biggest miracle worked 
here by the Society of Friends. For the Viennese people — 
pleasant, intelligent people, I have found them — the mission 
has softened both the bitterness of their defeat and the 
hardness of their suffering. To men and women utterly 
humiliated by conquest and crushed by privation, it has 
been a wonderful thing to be helped by those from whom 
they least expected help. Through the gentleness and self- 
sacrifice of these workers they will be able to rebuild their 
broken lives." 

Carolena M. Wood was the first American Friend to take 
active steps to express sympathy and love and a spirit of 
service to the German people in their own country. She 
went to France in the spring of 1919, visited the French 
Mission and through the assistance of Herbert Hoover was 
able to go forward to Germany with the expectation of 
having food supplies to distribute. Jane Addams and Dr. 
Alice Hamilton, both of whom had joined our Mission in 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 257 

France, arranged also to go to Germany with Carolena 
Wood. When they reached London they found a small 
party of English Friends preparing to set out on a similar 
mission, as soon as the Peace Treaty was signed. A minute 
of the London Meeting for Sufferings of the Society of 
Friends, under date of July 4th, 1919, expresses the pur- 
pose of the delegation — the first to go to Germany with a 
purely unselfish aim and with a hope to prove that there 
are no frontiers to love. The minute says : 

"We are thankful to learn that the following members of the 
religious Society of Friends are now proceeding to Germany 
under a deep sense of the need which exists for mutual friendly 
intercourse and fellowship between those who all belong to the 
same great human family and who have been separated during 
these sad years of war, namely: 

"Marion C. Fox, Joan M. Fry, J. Thompson Elliott, and Max 
Bellows from England, together with Carolena M. Wood, from 
America, who is accompanied by Jane Addams and Dr. Alice 
Hamilton. 

"Our friends are traveling on behalf of the committee which 
has under its care the arrangements for sending 'Gifts of Love' 
to Germany, in the form of food, clothes, and other necessities, — 
a work that is shared in, not only by 'the Emergency Committee 
for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in 
Distress' and 'the Friends War Victims Relief Committee,' but 
by many other persons not associated with Friends in mem- 
bership." 

The four English members of the committee who travelled 
through the occupied region and entered Germany via 
Cologne, reached Berlin July 6th; the three American 
members who traveled through Holland and crossed the 
border on the first civilian passports issued there since the 
signing of peace, arrived in Berlin July 7th. Dr. Aletta 



258 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

Jacobs, a Dutch physician who had been asked as a neutral 
to make observations on health conditions in Germany, was 
a fourth member of the second party. Dr. Elizabeth Rot- 
ten of Berlin, who has been acting as the representative in 
Germany of the work of the English Friends and is also 
head of the Educational Committee of the German Asso- 
ciation for the Promotion of the League of Nations, was 
naturally guide and adviser in making arrangements for 
the distribution of such assistance as we might be able to 
send from America. 

The American Friends Service Committee put $30,000 
at the disposal of this delegation to be used for the most 
urgently needed foods. English Friends had ever since 
the signing of the armistice been sending supplies of food 
and clothing to Germany. In addition to our appropriation 
for food we also sent twenty-five tons of new clothing. It 
was a small amount in the face of such universal need as 
was revealed there, but it was at least a beginning and a 
promise of what might follow, and it indicated a spirit of 
faith and hope that a new era of life might emerge. 

Jane Addams and Dr. Hamilton made a careful and il- 
luminating study of health and food conditions. Their 
report was issued in Bulletin No. 25 of the Service Com- 
mittee's publications and has been widely circulated in 
America. No one who has read this report can doubt that 
there was a grave situation to be met. 

Carolena Wood's letters supply vivid accounts of the 
great suffering in Germany. She says: ''The first week 
or ten days I was in Germany was given to visiting hos- 
pitals, orphan asylums, day nurseries and clinics for chil- 
dren to gather an impression of the physical suffering which 
is here by seeing some of the little wasted bodies due to the 
ravages of tuberculosis and rickets, and which must result 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 259 

in death, invalidism, or a lot of dwarfs. All is directly 
due to under-nourishment. As we went about there ran 
in my ears these words of the desperate mother to the 
prophet, 'I have but a handful of meal in the barrel and 
a little oil in the cruse, and behold I am gathering two 
sticks that I may go in and dress it for me and my son 
that we may eat it and die/ So far has Germany gone. . . . 

**When I saw the destruction left in the battle-fields 
of France I wished that all the world might go there to 
see what war is, but this is no less a battle-field with its 
deep awful lesson. The birth rate is reduced one-half and 
it is well. This is a hard world into which to invite a new 
life to come. We must first make the world safe for it. 

*'When I saw Mr. Hoover in Paris he said: 'We may 
count food values in calories, but we have no way to meas- 
ure human misery.' We may go about the streets here 
looking at the shop windows and at the well people we 
see, and not know the sorrow of Germany. It is only as 
we enter humbly and tenderly into the room of suffering 
that our hearts can in same sense measure the pain. ' ' 

But great as is the material need the spiritual need is 
even greater. We quote from Carolena Wood : ' ' The result 
of this physical under-nourishment on the mental and 
spiritual life of the people is, of course, profound. It is 
very difficult for them to concentrate their minds on any 
subject for long, and their judgments must be superficial. 
They are mentally tired and worn. Doubt follows them 
everywhere as they look at their neighbors, at their politi- 
cal parties, at their government, at the world, at mankind, 
at God. They say again and again, ' we are hopeless. ' Still 
upon these hungry bodies and tired souls press the most 
tremendous problems of reconstruction in business, church 
and government. . . . 



260 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

''It is impossible to over-emphasize the despair of the 
higher class people who have not a spiritual perspective, 
and it is very touching the way in which they lay hold of 
a Friendly hand and of Friendly thoughts. There is a 
wonderful opening for us here. The philosophy of force 
has crumpled in their hands. ' ' 

The effect of this visit of English and American Friends 
upon the German people of all classes was astonishing. It 
was an instant revelation of the way heart responds to 
heart and spirit to spirit. They found a people wounded, 
beaten, broken in body and spirit. The terms of peace 
had made people in Germany suppose that the whole world 
was determined to humiliate and crush them to the last 
turn of the screw. Unexpectedly a group of representative 
Friends came among them with no reference to their wick- 
edness, with no desire for vengeance, but, on the contrary, 
breathing peace and kindness and bearing in their hands 
tokens of friendship and kindly human interest. The im- 
pression made upon all classes of people was profound, and 
though they desperately needed food they appeared even 
more eager to learn about the underlying religious faith 
and the spiritual message of their Friendly visitors. 

Other English Friends followed up the visit of this first 
group and the American committee was planning to send 
over a small unit of men and women to render various 
types of service during the winter, when we were suddenly 
surprised to receive from Herbert Hoover, chairman of 
the American Relief Administration of the European 
Children's Fund a call to take entire charge in Germany 
of the distribution of food to save the children. He came 
first to Philadelphia and presented to a small group of 
us in person his plan of relief. This was supplemented 
and made more definite in a lettet sent to the chairman of 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 261 

the committee, and later the whole plan was re-stated in a 
second letter written November 17th, which was as follows : 

Friend Jones: — I beg to confirm the understanding with re- 
gard to our arrangement that you should further expand your 
organization of rehef for under-nourished children in Germany. 
As I explamed to j^ou, the European Children's Fund, under my 
direction, is at present engaged in the special feeding of some 
three million under-nourished children in various parts of Europe 
and there has been placed in the hands of this fund certain 
moneys for extension of this work to Germany. 

There can be no question as to the need of further expansion 
of the service that your society has been for some months cann- 
ing on in Germany. The vital statistics as to mortality and mor- 
bidity of German child life are sufficient evidence of this, aside 
from the personal knowledge I have as to the actual nutritional 
situation amongst children. 

The food situation in all parts of Europe affects child life more 
than any other element in that community, because the destruc- 
tion of cattle and the shortage of cattle-feed will continue the 
milk famine over this coming winter with great severity. Despite 
the suffering and losses imposed upon the American people 
through the old German Government, I do not believe for a 
moment that the real American would have any other wish 
than to see any possible service done in protection of child life 
wherever it is in danger. We have never fought with women 
and children. 

I particularly turn to you, because I am anxious that efforts of 
this kind should not become the subject of political propaganda. 
The undoubted probity, ability and American character of the 
Quakers for generations will prevent any such use being made of 
your service, and for this reason, I propose that the funds at 
my disposal should be devoted exclusively to your support. 

In order that you may have definite support upon which you 
may rely, the European Children's Fund will undertake to fur- 
nish transportation, both railway and overseas, entirely free of 



262 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

charge to your society for any supplies that you may wish to 
dispatch for child relief from the United States to any point in 
Germany, up to next July. This office will also, if you desire, 
act free of charge as purchasing agent for any such supplies, 
handling them in combination with supplies for the sixteen other 
countries where work for children is in active progress. I under- 
stand that your society is prepared to pay the entire overhead 
expenses of organization in the United States and of distribution 
in Germany and, therefore, any contributions made to you would 
be entirely expended in the purchase of foodstuffs ex-factory in 
the United States, with no deductions for management or trans- 
portation. 

It is my understanding that your actual distribution in Germany 
is done through local German charitable societies already en- 
gaged in such work and will be supervised by Quaker delegates 
from the United States. I wish to express my appreciation of 
the wisdom of this basis of organization. 

I believe there are many patriotic American citizens of Ger- 
man descent who will be willing and anxious to contribute to your 
society for this work. I strongly urge upon all such well-in- 
tentioned persons to support your society to the extent of their 
resources. The need is great. Your society has demonstrated 
its large abilities and sympathy. There will be no political com- 
plexion in your work. Subscriptions to you under these arrange- 
ments will secure a much larger result in actual food delivered 
than through any other sources. 

Faithfully yours, 

(Signed) Herbert Hoover. 

The Service Committee went to work at once (1) to 
select a unit for this service and (2) to organize for the 
task of raising a food fund to supply the material for the 
work of relief. A unit of highly qualified workers was 
quickly selected. It consisted of the following persons, 
under the leadership of Alfred G. Scattergood of Phila- 
delphia : Dr. Henry S. Pratt, J. Edgar Rhoads, Harold 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 263 

Evans, Arthur C. Jackson, Robert W. Balderston, Catherine 
M. Cox, Caroline L. Nicholson, Albert J. Brown, Herman 
Newman, Julia E. Branson, Richard L. Cary, M. M. Bailey, 
James G. Vail, Emma T. R. Williams, William Eves 3rd, 
Jesse H. Holmes, Caroline G. Nonnent, and Arthur M. 
Charles. The second task has been slower and more dif- 
ficult. There has been a strong and deep-seated prejudice 
in the public mind against doing anything to relieve suf- 
fering in Germany, even to save the lives of children, and 
many whose kindly instincts were with the undertaking 
were yet restrained by public sentiment, or what they sup- 
posed was public sentiment. The German people in Amer- 
ica were eager to help their suffering friends in Germany 
but they wanted to do it themselves and in their own way. 
There was apparently, too, on the part of other Christian 
denominations in the country a feeling of surprise that one 
small body like ours should have been chosen out alone to 
do this extensive piece of work. Gradually, however, the 
difficulties are yielding to solution. When it became gen- 
erally understood that the names of donors were to be given 
wide publicity in Germany and that Friends were keeping 
themselves in the background as much as possible while do- 
ing the work, and were acting solely as the transmitters of 
desperately needed help, the attitude changed. Funds are 
now coming from all parts of America for this work and we 
hope that as a result relief can be carried into aLl the most 
needy centers of Germany. 

Friends have another important unit at work, in Poland 
where the conditions of under-feeding and of disease are 
hardly surpassed anywhere, and where there is a universal 
lack of clothing and fuel. This work which was primarily 
begun by English Friends without assistance from us has 
now become in some sense a joint undertaking. We have 



264 SERVICE OF LOVE IN WAR TIME 

sent a small group of American workers and we are fur- 
nishing funds towards the maintenance of the service. 
The unit has been actively engaged in stamping out the 
dreaded typhus fever and it has established a maternity 
and child-welfare dispensary at Zawiercie. The group has 
consisted of about twenty-five workers, three of whom have 
unfortunately died, two of the typhus epidemic. We 
have sent a small commission to investigate conditions of 
life and needed forms of relief in the Baltic provinces, 
especially in Lithuania. Many of the refugees who were 
helped by our mission at Buzuluk came from the Kovno 
region of Lithuania, and we have hoped that we might 
assist them to get settled and started once more in their 
old home land where conditions are very difficult. 

Another field of service seems just now to be opening be- 
fore us in the Ukraine. The Service Committee has been 
requested by the Ukraine Association in America to form a 
unit to go out as a bureau of the American Red Cross and 
to take charge of the distribution of immense quantities of 
clothing and supplies — especially medicinal supplies — 
which the Ukraine Republic bought of the American Expe- 
ditionary Force in France and which are still stored in that 
country. We have consented to undertake this new task 
and we are ready to form a unit of workers as soon as the 
supplies are released in France for this purpose. 

Nearer home also we are hearing a call for service. An 
invitation has come to the committee to send a reconstruc- 
tion unit to Mexico. We have decided to accept the call 
and to carry into the disturbed and distracted country 
across our border a similar type of service and a similar 
spirit of fellowship to those which have characterized the 
work of reconstruction in Europe. 

Nor is this all that the Service Committee has in mind. 



SERVICE WORK IN OTHER LANDS 265 

It is preparing for many other lines and forms of helpful 
activity. It is calling upon young Friends throughout the 
country to look toward volunteering for at least one year 
of service for others before entering upon their life career 
in business vocations. Many types of community service 
are being proposed for their consideration while the Ser- 
vice Committee stands ready to open the door for each 
specific line of activity, and to provide the financial assist- 
ance for the experiment. It is hoped, of course, that many 
qualified persons will thus be turned permanently into 
avenues of public and community service. 

Nothing that our hands can do ever can atone for the 
agony, the losses and the suffering which have fallen upon 
the innocent during these years of world tragedy. But I 
have reviewed some of the ways in which a small group of 
Christian people, who are trying to follow the Galilean, 
have labored to express their love and sympathy for the 
harrowed and distressed innocents upon whom the violence 
of the storm has fallen. It is not written to bring glory 
to any person or people. It is written solely to interpret a 
spirit and way of life, to convey, if possible, the truth that 
love will work everywhere and always — semper et ubique — 
even with enemies, vastly better than the way of hate works. 
Long ago in a beautiful story Tolstoy insisted that Love is 
''what men live by." These various missions here reported 
have been trying to demonstrate that. If this book has 
transmitted that idea, it has fulfilled its purpose. 



APPENDIX*A 
American Reconstruction Workers in Prance 

* Member of the Haverford Unit. 



Walter H. Abell, Folsom, Delaware Co., Pa. 
Loren 0. Adamson, Indianola, Iowa. 

Louisa A. Alden, 2313 Dorchester Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Joseph T. Allen, 437 N. Painter Ave., Whittier, Cal.' 
J. Roy Allgyer, West Liberty, Ohio. 
S. E. Allgyer, West Liberty, Ohio. 
Harold T. Allman, Friendswood, Texas. 
*Vaughn D. Amick, Haviland, Kansas. 
Esther Andrews, Shelton, Conn. 

Esther C. Andrews, 225 S. Washington Ave., Whittier, Cal 
Mary E. Appel, 625 Hamilton St., Allentown, Pa. 
Truman D. Arnold, 1050 E. Rornbach St., Wilmington, Ohio 
Tracy B. Augur, 43 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 
Fred D. Augsberger, Elida, Ohio. 

B 

Herbert H. Babb, R, F. D. No. 1, Ivor, Va. 

Howard W. Babb, R. F. D. No. 1, Ivor, Va.* 
*Dr. James A. Babbitt, 19th and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa. 

Philip R. Bailey, 221 Forest Ave., Portland. Me. 

Roland H. Bainton, 1108 Edwards Hall, New Haven, Conn. 

Herbert N. Baker, Tonganoxie, Kansas. 

John C. Baker, Everett, Bedford Co., Pa. 

M. Louise Baker, 140 N. 15th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
"Caleb C. Balderston, Jr., Kennett Square, Pa. 

Mark Balderston, Colora, Md. (Guilford College, N. C.) 

Richard M. Balderston, Colora, Md. 

John D. Barlow, London, Eng. 

Floyd E. Bates, Salem, R. F. D. No. 4, Oregon. 

267 



268 APPENDIX 

Charles Baynes, R: R. 3, Salem, Indiana. 

Charles S. Beal Minneapolis, Minn. 

Ellis H. Beals, Greenleaf, Idaho. 

Lee E. Beier, Cazenovia, Wisconsin. 

Thomas A. Benson, Homedale, Idaho. 
*F. Fiirman Betts, 24 Carpenter St., Gtn., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Helen E. Biddle, 207 Bank Ave., Riverton, N. J. 

William C. Biddle, 107 Chambers St., New York City. 
*A. Carroll Binder, Minnesota Daily Star, Minneapolis, Minn. 

Ernest C. Binford, Haviland, Kansas. 

Clarence H. Binns, 4215 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Willard C. Blackburn, New Waterford, Ohio. 

Anita Bliss, 410 Park Ave., New York City. 

Amos T. Bontrager, R. 2, Shipshewana, Indiana. 

Ethel Boogher, 6300 Waterman Ave., St. Louis, Missouri. 

Lewis 0. Booth, Flora, Indiana. 

William C. Bowen, Box 1 185, Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 
*Arthur L. Bowerman, care of Girard Trust Co., Broad and Chestnut, 
Philadelphia, Pa. 

Walter G. Bowerman, 34 E. 32nd St., Bayonne, N. J. 

Joseph H. Branson, Lansdowne, Pa. 

Kenneth A. Bray, 1511 Fulton Ave., New York City. 

Alfred W. Brenneman, Denbeigh, Va. 

Benjamin F. Brenneman, Denbeigh, Va. 

Mabel Brewer, Forest Hills, New York. 

Walter C. Brinton, 4540 Adams Ave., Frankford, Pa. (Deceased). 

William J. Brockelbank, Newmarket, Ontario, Can. ( Haverf ord. Pa. ) . 

Esther Brophy, Moorestown, N. J. 

Malcolm A. Brosius, 1502 Delaware Ave., Wilmington, Del. 
*Charles F. Brown, 59 Addington Rd., Brookline, Mass. 

Dorothy M. Brown, East Lansing, Michigan. 

Elliott W. Brown, 59 Addington Rd., Brookline, Mass. 

* Ernest L. Brown, Moorestown, N. J. 
Henry T. Brown, Jr., Moorestown, N. J. 
Pearson C. Brown, R. R. 2, Ilderton, Ontario, Can. 
Robert P. Brown, II, Moorestown, N. J. 

*Sidney F. Brown, 333 N. Irvington Ave., Indianapolis, Ind. 
Vesta Brown, 6 Bethany Place, St. Louis, Missouri. 

* Ralph P. Bruner, Greenfield, Ind. 
Roy Buchanan, Roanoke, 111. 
Chester E. Bundy, Converse, Indiana. 
Edith C. Bunting, Swarthmore, Pa. 

*E. Morris Burdsall, Port Chester, New York. 

* Richard L. Burdsall, Port Chester, New York. 



APPENDIX 269 

*John H. Buzby, Hotel Dennis, Atlantic City, N. J. 
William F. Byron, Johnstown, Pa. 
George H. Byeraft, R. R. No. 2, Ilderton, Ontario, Can. 



Leah T. Cadbury, Haverford, Pa. 

Clyde T. Caldwell, Fairmount, Ind. 
*Leland S. Calvert, Selma, Ohio. 

Stewart F. Campbell, care of Geo. Hewlett, 79 Wall St., New York 

City. 
*G. Cheston Carey, 1004 Cathedral St., Baltimore, Md. 

Howard L. Carey, Fairmount, Ind. 

Helen G. Carlyle, 843 Hunts Point Ave., New York City. 

Cassius C. Carter, 3rd and College, Newberg, Oregon. 

Elmer W. Carter, Somerton, Philadelphia, Pa. 
*Leland K. Carter, 536 N. Central Court, Indianapolis, Ind. 

Rebecca Carter, 5356 Knox St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Melvin A. Cawl, 210 Brooklyn Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. 

Charles H. Chaffin, 931 Lakeview, Emporia, Kansas. 

Elliott P. Chambers, 5770 N. Madison Ave., Pasadena, Cal. 

Fred J. Chambers, Damascus, Ohio. 
^William C. Chambers, 3839 Powelton Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Edith A. Chandlee, 5529 Morris St., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pa. 

Emma Chandler, 127 Kingsley Ave., Waterloo, Iowa. 

Harry L. Charles, Tangier, Okla. 

Marianna Chase, Kansas City, Mo. 
*Lowell J. Chawner, Pasadena, Cal. 

W. Walker Cheyney, 93 LaCrosse Ave., Lansdowne, Pa. 

* Frank E. Cholerton, Montrose, Pa. 

Elsie S. Church, 9 South Ave., Ithaca, New York. 

Lewis C. Clark, Bendena, Kansas. 

Ruth Clark, Georgetown, 111. 

Laurence Clendenon, Chewelah, Wash. 

Edith Coale, 100 Lippincott Ave., Riverton, N. J. 

James C. Cocks, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. 

Rowland C. Cocks, 315 Seward Ave., Detroit, Mich. 

Theron E. Coffin, Earlham, Indiana. 

Frank E. Colcord, Newberg, Oregon. 

* Arthur Collins, Jr., 513 Ogden Ave., Swarthmore, Pa. 
*Byron C. Collins, Moorestown, N. J. 

Laura E. Comfort, 1340 Lombard St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
Forrest D. Comfort, 321 N. "C" St., Oskaloosa, Iowa. 
Marion S. Comly, 3311 Arch St., Philadelphia, Pa. 



270 APPENDIX 

Daniel A. Compton, 317 E. 3rd St., Plainfield, N. J. (Deceased). 

Chase L. Conover, 519 N. First St., Oskaloosa, Iowa. 

Bennett S. Cooper, Moorestown, N. J. 
*J. Arthur Cooper, 1316 E. Lincoln Highway, Coatesville, Pa. 

Oliver J. Cope, 1914 W. Main St., Marshalltown, Iowa. 

Paul M. Cope, Hotel Morton, Atlantic City, N. J. 
*Thomas P. Cope, Jr., 200 E. Johnson St., Gtn., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Omer A. Coppock, Drummond, Oklahoma. 

Charles W. Cory, Jr., Gordon Bible School, 30 Evans Way, Boston, 
Mass. 

Garfield V. Cox, 915 S. Grant Ave., Crawfordsville, Ind. 

Joel Bean Cox, Paia Maui, Terr, Hawaii. 

J. Boyd Cressman, 38 Chapel St., Kitchener, Ontario, Can. 

A. Hurford Crosman, 564 Forest Ave., Portland, Me. 
*William S. Crowder, 205 W. Upsal St., Gtn., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Sara A. Cunningham, Hammonton, New Jersey. 

Margaret Curtis, 28 Mt. Vernon St., Boston, Mass. 



*Benjamin A. Darling, 4023 Smith Ave., Everett, Washington. 

Henry Davis, Guilford College, N. C. 
*Horace B, Davis, 44 Edge Hill Rd., Brookline, Mass. 

Milton C. Davis, Miller Place, Long Island, N". Y. 

Joe H. Detweiler, R. D. 3, Volant, Pa. 

Francis H. Diament, Devon, Pa. 

Arthur D. Diller, Elida, Ohio. 

Mabel C. S. D'Olier, Moorestown, N. J. 

Lloyd H. Donnell, Framingham Center, Mass. 

Flavia M. Doty, 2224 Washington Boulevard, Chicago, 111. 

John W. Dorland, 1875 N. Michigan Ave., Pasadena, Cal. 

Howard H. Douglas, 1123 W. Court St., Los Angeles, Cal. 

J. Nathan Douglas, R. F. D. 4, Brunswick, Maine. 

George V. Downing, Elsmere, Delaware. 

Edward R. Drange, 314 S. 4th St., Elkhart, Ind. 

Daniel D. Driver, Garden City, Missouri. (Heston, Kansas.) 

Mary E. Duguid, Moylan, Pa. 

William Duguid, Moylan, Pa. 

Eleanor L. Dulles, Auburn, New York. 

Sophia H. Dulles, 311 S. 22nd St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Eugene A. Dungan, R. R. 3, Muscatine, Iowa. 

George S. Dunn, 2126 N. Camac St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Fred A. Dushame, 56 Osgood St., Lawrence, Mass. 



APPENDIX 271 

E 

Franklin M. Earnest, Jr., Mifflinburg, Pa. 

Charles B. Eavey, Grantham, Pa. 

Paul K. Edwards, 228 College Ave., Richmond, Ind. 
*William L. Edwards, 2054 New Jersey Ave., Indianapolis, Ind. 

Helen T. Elder, 240 Central Ave., Dayton, Ohio. 

Katharine W. Elkinton, Moylan, Pa. 

Howard W. Elkinton, Moylan, Pa. 

Errol T. Elliott, Haviland, Kansas. 
*Meade G. Elliott, Y. M. C. A., Seattle, Washington. 

Paul S. Elliott, Newberg, Oregon. 

Paul G. Engel, Central City, Nebraska. 

Charles Evans, Riverton, New Jersey. 

F 

Ralph Fanning, Riverhead, L. I. 

Francis H. Farquhar, Wilmington, Ohio. 

Lawrence Farr, 1408 West "M" Ave., Oskaloosa, Iowa. 

Fred D. Fellow, Jr., Windfall, Indiana. 

Eldred H. Ferguson, Whittier, Cal. 

John R. Ferres, R. R. 2, Carthage, Missouri (Springfield, Mo.) 

Frances C. Ferris, 151 W. Hortter St., Germantown, Pa. 

Leander W. Fisher, 176 Williams Ave., Lynn, Mass. 

Emily M. Fletcher, 3232 Ellis Ave., Chicago, 111. 

Jean Flickinger, Dalton, Mass. 

Jacob B. Flory, 161 E. King St., Lancaster, Pa. 

Jesse G. Forsythe, R. F. D. No. 3, Media, Pa. 

Harlan J. Fuller, Chewelah, Washington. 

Arthur D. Fulton, 2617 Maryland Ave., Baltimore, Md. 

G 

Arthur S. Gamble, Winona, Ohio. 
*Lewis S. Gannett, 47 Barrow St., New York City. 

Mary R. Gannett, care of N. Y. World, Park Row, New York City. 

Julia A. Gardner, 2026 P. St., Washington, D. C. 
*Albert G. Garrigues, Haverford, Pa. 

Paul A. George, P. 0. Box 272, League City, Texas. 

Christopher J. Gerber, Las Cruces, New Mexico. 

Orie B. Gerig, Smithville, Ohio. 

Helen J. Gifford, 1113 Davis St., Evanston, 111. 

Maurice H. Gifford, Lindsay, Cal. 



272 APPENDIX 

James E. Gaagey, Elizabethtown, Pa- 
Walter L. Goddard, 41 Buswell St., Lawrence, Mass. 
*Clifton D. Goff, Manhasset, Long Island, N. Y. 

Margaret Gold, 719 Rush St., Chicago, 111. 

Dorothy Good, Williamsport, Pa. 

Wistar E. Goodhue, 639 Church Lane, Gtn., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Paul W. Gordon, R. R. 3, Box 104, Bluflfton, Ind. 

William M. Gordon, 159 Chester Ave., Chelsea, Mass. 

Malbone W. Graham, Jr., 1639 Oxford St., Berkeley, Cal. 

Chester S. Graybill, Bareville, Pa. 

Mrs. Elwood Griest, 208 S. Queen St., Lancaster, Pa. 
*Elwood Griest, 208 S. Queen St., Lancaster, Pa. 

Joseph C. Griffen, 70 Prospect St., Port Chester, N. Y. 

H 

*Leland T. Hadley, 327 W. Main St., Richmond, Ind. 

Loren S. Hadley, W. Locust St., Wilmington, Ohio. 

Olin C. Hadley, Athena, Oregon. 

Willford P. C. Hagaman, 1556 Adams Ave., Frankford, Pa. 
* Joseph H. Haines, 5433 Wayne Ave., Germantown, Philadelphia, Pa. 

Ward L. Haines, 1156 E. Morrison St., Portland, Ore. 

Albert D. Hall, 665 Galena Ave., Pasadena, Cal. 

Foster A. Hall, R. R. 1, Salem, Ohio. 

J. Floyd Hall, Owasa, Iowa. 

Archibald C. Halliday, Menlo Park, R. F. D. 1, Box 64, Cal. 

Laura Hammer, Klamath Falls, Oregon. 

Russell B. Hampton, R. D. 2, Salem, Ohio. 

Edwin Hanson, Central City, Nebraska. 

Gurney F. Hanson, Stickney, South Dakota. 

William Y. Hare, 3401 N. 21st St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Gordon B. Hartshorn, Walden, Orange Co., New York. 

J. Mahlon Harvey, Fairmount, Indiana. 

Cecil E. Haworth, R. 1, Springville, Iowa. 

Harry H. Haworth, Healdsburgh High School, Healdsburgh, Cal. 
*William W. Hayes, West Chester, Pa. 
*Leslie 0. Heath, Pittsfield, Mass. 

A. Russell Heaton, Ferris Lane, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. 

Abbie E. Henby, Greenfield, Indiana. 

Sidney Henderson, Paullina, Iowa. 

Marvin J. Henley, Guilford College, North Carolina. 

Lloyd D. Hershey, Intercourse, Pa. 

Asa M. Hertzler, Denbeigh, Va. 

Fred I. Hester, Ridgefarm, 111. 



APPENDIX 273 

Fred W. Hiatt, Fountain City, Indiana. 

Abraham E. Hiebert, R. F. D. No. 1, Hillsboro, Kansas. 

Herbert A. Hill, 1414 Garfield Ave., Pasadena, Cal. 

Horace P. Hill, 415 Oak Grove St., Minneapolis, Minn. 
*D. Plainer Hinshaw, 824 Commercial St., Emporia, Kansas. 

Ezra B. Hinshaw, Greenleaf, Idaho. 

Harvey D. Hinshaw, Yadkinville, N. C. 

Virgil V. Hinshaw, Newberg, Oregon. (Studying abroad.) 
♦Richard J. M. Hobbs, Guilford College, N. C. 

D. R. Hoeppner, Hillsboro, Kansas. 

Ruth Hoffman, 2302 Monroe St., Wilmington, Del. 

Wray B. Hoffman, 2302 Monroe St., Wilmington, Del. 

Laurence Hollingsworth, West Branch, Iowa. 

Frederick T. Hollowell, 609 W. 127th St., New York City. 

Hilda P. Holme, Baltimore, Md. 

George O. Holmes, Foster, Nebraska. 

Jesse H. Holmes, Jr., 5 Whittier Place, Swarthmore, Pa. 

Richard S. Holmgren, E. Lynn, Mass. 

Walter J. Homan, Oskaloosa, Iowa. 
*Harold D. Hood, West Chester, Pa. 

Ruth Hoopes, 220 S. Broad St., Kennett Square, Pa. 

Floyd R. Horine, 1308— 18th St., Des Moines, Iowa. 
*Frank L. Hornbrook, 806 Florida Ave., Tampa, Fla. 

Grace C. Hornbrook, 806 Florida Ave., Tampa, Fla. 

Joseph J. Hoskins, Leesburg, Ohio. 

Atlee A. Hostetler, Baltic, Ohio. 

Forrest E. Hostetler, Topeka, Indiana. 

Hamer V. Hostetler, West Liberty, R. R. 2, Ohio. 

James A. Hostetler, Baltic, Ohio. 

John L. Hotson, Brooklyn, N. Y. 

Ronald B. Hotson, 728 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, N. Y. 

Israel E. Hough, Ambler, Pa. 

Folger B. Howell, R. D. 9, Springfield, Ohio. 
*Weston Howland, New Bedford, Mass. 

James A. Hull, Stafford, Kansas. 

Wm. I. Hull, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. 

Raymond C. Hunnicutt, 337 N. Painter Ave., Whittier, Cal. 

Milton P. Hunter, R. F. D. No. 2, Mt. Kisco, New York. 

Beulah A. Hurley, New Hope, Pa. 
* Philip W. Hussey, North Berwick, Maine. 



Eleanore Iredale, care of Mr. T. J. Porter, Rose Valley, Moylan, Pa. 



274 APPENDIX 



Anna G. Jacob, 13 Hollis Court Boulevard, Queens, Long Island. 

J. Robert James, R. D., West Chester, Pa. 

Elmer H. Janz, Larned, Kansas. 

Cornelius C. Janzen, Bethel College, Newtown, Kansas. 

Harold M. Jay, 151 College St., Wilmington, Ohio. 
*Alfred W. Jenkins, 321 College Ave., Biehmond, Ind. 

Francis A. Jenkins, 5411 Greenwood Ave., Chicago, 111. 

F. Raymond Jenkins, 609 National Rd., Richmond, Ind. 

Carl C. Johnson, Camden, Indiana. 

Carroll E. Johnson, Oskaloosa, Iowa. 
*Given C. Johnson, Le Grand, Iowa. 

Marjorie D. Johnson, 626 N. Henry St., Madison, Wis. 

Omer C. Johnson, Richland, Iowa. 

Robert H. Johnson, 205 N. 11th St., Richmond, Ind. 

Truman R. Johnson, 1101 N. Los Robles, Pasadena, Cal. 

Arthur Jones, 192 Essex St., Lynn, Mass. 

Dorothea B. Jones, 125 E. Fourth St., Conshohocken, Pa. 

Ernest F. Jones, Swansea, Mass. 

Harlan T. Jones, Central College, Central City, Neb. 

John L. Jones, 6012 Ridge Ave., Roxborough, Philadelphia, Pa. 
*Dr. Rufus M. Jones, Haverford, Pa. 

Nellie Joyce, Central City, Nebraska. 

K 

Wilbur W. Kamp, New Philadelphia, Ohio. 
D. Chauncey Kauffman, R. R. 3, West Liberty, Ohio. 
John M. Kauffman, West Liberty, Ohio. 
Addison R. Kauffman, Box 285, Newberg, Oregon. 
Henry G. Keeney, Newberg, Oregon. 
James C. Keever, No. Manchester, Ind. 
*Donald R. Kellum, Camby, Ind. 
Mary Kelsey, Short Hills, New Jersey. 
Robert M. Kelsey, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. 
Harvey E. Kitts, Kokomo, R. R. 9, Indiana, (Deceased.)' 
George S. Klassen, Lehigh, Marion Co., Kansas. 
Clifford L. Knight, Liscomb, Iowa. 

Cornelius F. Kruse, 1108 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn. 
Frederick R. Kuh, Chicago, 111. 



*Harold S. Laity, Chappaqua, New York. 
Herbert M. Lake, Chagrin Falls, Ohio. 
*Ezra W. Lamb, Amboy, Indiana. 



APPENDIX 275 

Mary A. Lamb, Hatfield House, Long Beach, Cal. 
Harold M. Lane, 20 S. Twelfth St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
Kussell A. Lantz, Topeka, Ind. (W.) 
Richard A. Larkin, 151 College St., Wilmington, Ohio. 
John R. Levis, Drexel Hill, Pa. 
Lucy Riddle Lewis, Lansdowne, Pa. 
Frederick J. Libby, Exeter, N. H. 
Harry M. Lichety, Sterling, Ohio. 
Ora R. Lichety, Sterling, Ohio. 
Lawrence E. Lindley, Russiaville, Ind. 

*Howard A. Lippincott, 243 W. Main St., Moorestown, N. J. 
Albert J. Livezey, R. F. D. No. 1, Box No. 63, Barnesville, Ohio. 
Alfred H. Loeb, St. James Hotel Annex, Philadelphia, Pa. 
Clinton H. Longshore, Langhorne, Pa. 
Dolan H. Loree, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. 
Ella L. Lounsberry, 1805 Fuller Ave., Hollywood, Cal. 
Helen Lyman. 

Mo. 

*Abbott McClure, 304 S. 16th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Lloyd J. McCracken, Rose Hill, Kansas. 

Jacob H. McDonnel, Burr Oak, Kansas. 

Arthur H. McFadden, Box 294, State College, Pa. 

Maynard J. McKay, 502 N. Walnut St., Wilmington, Ohio. 

Alice McKinsey, Gross, Nebraska. 
*Hugh E. McKinstry, 140 Dean St., West Chester, Pa. 

Mark E. C. McMillian, Wilmington, Ohio. 

Herbert B. McVey, 123 Rornback Ave., Wilmington, Ohio. 

Charles E. McPherson, 31 No. Warren Ave., Columbus, Ohio. 

M 

*E. Carleton MacDowell, Cold Spring Harbor, L. I., N. Y. 

Harvey G. Mack, 3330 N. Sydenham St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Adelaide P. Mackereth, Elkview, Pa. 
*Roland E. Maey, New Providence, Iowa. 

John W. Magee, R. 1, Box 87, Silverton, Ore. 

Gladys Manning, 156 Mavety St., Toronto, Ontario, Can. 

Katharine S. Maris, 835 Jefferson St., Wilmington, Del. 

Robert H. Maris, 1009 Jefferson St., Wilmington, Del. 

Loren B. Markle, R. R. 3, Gaston, Indiana. 

Thurman B. Markle, Gaston, Indiana. 
*E. Howard Marshall, Union, Iowa. 
*Harold D. Marshall, Sutter, Cal. 



276 APPENDIX 

*L€wis H. Marshall, Westtown School, Westtown, Pa. 

Clinton Marshburn, R. F. D. 3, Orange, California. 

Oscar Marshburn, 140 S. Ritter Ave., Indianapolis, Ind. 

Sylvester L. Marshburn, Whittier College, Whittier, Cal. 

Josiah P. Marvel, 127 N. 10th St., Richmond, Ind. 

Samuel Mason, Jr., 704 Locust Ave., Germantown, Phila., Pa. 

Max Maxwell, 518 W. 9th St., Cincinnati, Ohio. 

Belle Mead, 320 16th Ave., S., Minneapolis, Minn. 

Frank R. Mekeel, Aurora, New York. 

Warren O. Mendenhall, Wyandotte, Oklahoma. 
*Raymond D. Mesner, Central City, Neb. 
*Robert D. Metcalf, 9 Wayne St., Worcester, Mass. 

Jacob C. Meyer, 1139 S. 8th St., Goshen, Ind. 

Dwight W. Michener, Truro, Iowa. 

Howard P. Michener, Truro, Iowa. 

R. Byran Michener, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. 

Ross C. Miles, Salem, Oregon. 

Alvin J. Miller, 480 W. Main St., Kent, Ohio-. 

Alice Thompson Miller, Ivy Lodge, 29 E. Penn St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Anna L. Miller, Riverton, New Jersey. 

Earl E. Miller, Manchester, Oklahoma. 

Eli A. Miller, Millersburg, Ohio. 

Payson Miller, Shipshewana, Indiana. 

Trueman T. Miller, Middlebury, Indiana. 

Alfred W. Milner, 151 College St., Wilmington, Ohio. 

Clyde A. Milner, Leesburg, Ohio. (Studying abroad.) 

Dillon W. Mills, Greenleaf, Idaho. 

George V. Mills, University of 111., McNabb, 111. 

Sumner A. Mills, Earlham, Indiana. 
*Charles W. Moon, 2001 Maple St., Wichita, Kansas. 

Edith C. Moon, Morrisville, Pa. 

Wyman J. Moon, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. 

Ezra A. Moore, Dudley, R. 2, N. C. (deceased) 

Lyman L. Moore, Liberty, North Carolina. 

Raymond T. Moore, 17 E. Stratford Ave., Lansdowne, Pa. 

Chalmer E. Morefield, Capron, Oklahoma. 

Elliston P. Morris, 2nd, Phila., Pa. 

Samuel Morris, Phila., Pa. 
*Louis R. Morrison, 805 W. 7th St., Richmond, Ind. 

Paul de Mott (Joined through the London oflBce). 

* Francis K. Murray, Palo Alto, Cal. 

* Frederick S. Murray, Palo Alto, Cal. 
*Harold Myers, Central City, Nebraska. 

Mervin S. Meyers, R. F. D. No. 7, Lancaster, Pa. 



APPENDIX 277 

N 

Jay J. Newlin, Earlham, Iowa. 

Mildred L. Nichols, 1604 West Pico, Los Angeles, Cal. 
E. Leslie Nicholson, R. F. D. 1, Westville, N. J. 
S. Francis Nicholson, 614 S. W. "A" St., Richmond, Ind. 
Sidney O. Nicholson, Westville, N. J. 
*Vincent D. Nicholson, 614 S. W. "A" St., Richmond, Ind. 
James A. Norton, 115 Second St., N. E., Washington, D. C. 
Marion S. Norton, 115 Second St., N. E., Washington, D. C. 
Dorothy North, Chicago, 111. 



Wendell F. Oliver, Lynn, Mass. 

William T. Oliver, 69 High Rock St., Lynn, Mass. 

Seymour H. Olmsted, 873 Oak St., Winetka, 111. 

Herman F. Oppenlander, 1071 Arnold St., Portland, Ore. 

Sarah M. Orr., 5645 Christian St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Walter E. Oswald, Charm, Ohio. 

Willard B. Otis, R. D. 60, Venice Center, N. Y. 

Jonas B. Otterson, Cochituate Road, Framingham, Mass. 

Charles L, Outland, Tarboro, Edgecombe Co., North Carolina. 

Elfred R. Outland, George, Northampton Co., N. C. 



Mary H. Packer, Newtown, Pa. 
*Jesse E. Packer, M. D., Newtown, Pa. 

Edgar Z. Palmer, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. 
*J. Hollowell Parker, 1923 St. Paul St., Baltimore, Md. 

Joseph I. Parker, 7 Avalon Apts., 10th & Alabama, Indianapolis, Ind. 

Clyde C. Parkes, 635 Jefferson St., Hillsboro, 111. 
♦Charles T. Parnell, Short Hills, N. J. 

Arthur B. Parsons, Attelboro Falls, Mass. 

Pleasaunce B. Parsons, Attleboro Falls, Mass. 

J. Donald Peacock, Charlottesville, Ind. 

Cecil E. Pearson, Newburg, Oregon. 

J. H. Ward Pearson, 981 Hawthorn Ave., Portland, Ore. 

Loren L. Peery, Thorntown, R. R. 4, Indiana. 

Charles E. Pennell, 93 W. LaCrosse Ave., Lansdowne, Pa. 

Clarence E. Pennell, Lansdowne, Pa. 

Charles F. Pennock, Lansdowne, Pa. 

Margaret L. Pennock, 6010 Green St., Germantown, Pa. 



278 APPENDIX 

Roger Pennock, 243 Harvey St., Germantown, Phila., Pa. 

Corwin H. Perisho, Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa. 

Samuel E. Peters, Friendsville, Tennessee. 

Katharine E. Phelps, St. James Hospital, Anking, China. 

Dixon C. Philips, 976 Kensington Ave., Plainfield, N. J. 

George B. Philips, 53 Oxford St., Cambridge, Mass. 

Thomas H. Philips, 315 Cedar Lane, Swarthmore, Pa. 

Vernon L. Pike, Placentia, Orange Co., Cal. 

Laurence R. Plank, 3313 2nd Ave., S., Minneapolis, Minn 

Frederick J. Pope, Vassalboro, R. F. D. 50, Maine. 
*Edmond C. Preston, 1220 Master St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
*William W. Price, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pa. 



Q 

*Eugene K. Quigg, 111 S. 12th St., Richmond, Ind. 
Dorothy Quimby, 17 Field Ave., New Rochelle, N. Y. 



James W. Ragsdale, Greenleaf, Idaho. 

Elliotte B. Ralston, Northbranch, Kansas. 

Willis H. Ratliff, R. No. 2, Fairmount, Ind. 

William R. Redick, Rockford, Ohio. 

Gurney B. Reece, Greensboro, N. C. 

Robert E. Reed, Brookfield, Mass. 

William K. Reichert, 320 W. 84th St., New York City. 

Leroy W. Reynolds, Mooresville, Ind. 

Charles J. Rhoads, 1914 S. Rittenhouse Sq., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Lillie F. Rhoads, 1914 S. Rittenhouse Sq., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Hubert Richardson, Passaic, N. J. 

Richard A. Ricks, 1149 West Ave., Richmond, Va. 

James W. Ridpath, New Sharon, Iowa. 

Anna W. Roberts, Moorestown, N. J. 

Christopher Roberts, Newark, N. J. 

E. Merrill Root, 55 Putnam St., Sommerville, Mass. 

Esther S. Root, 2 W. 67th St., New York City. 

Curtis D. Ross, Haviland, Kansas. 

Huldah Ross, Short Hills, N. J. 

R. Frank Ross, Haviland, Kansas. 

Luther Russell, Drumwright, Oklahoma. 

Mary T. Russell, 79 Trumbull St., New Haven, Conn. 



APPENDIX 279 

*Parvin M. Russell, 23 W. 106th St., New York City. 
Ralph M, Rutledge, % Ryan Fruit Co., Yakima, Wash. 
Walter N. Rutt, Florin, Lancaster Co., Pa, 

S 

Carleton E. Sager, 3700 Hamilton St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Arthur Santmier, Hecla, Manitoba, Can. 

Charles S. Satterthwait, 16 S. 10th Ave., Bethlehem, Pa. 

M. Elizabeth Satterthwaite, Tecumseh, Michigan. 

Clifford R. Saylors, 1123 State St., Emporia, Kansas. 

J. Henry Scattergood, Villa Nova, Pa. 

Marjory Scattergood, 3515 Powelton Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Maria C. Scattergood, 3515 Powelton Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Floyd W. Schmoe, 4502 12th St., N. E., Seattle, Wash. 

Milo M, Schoonover, Byers, R. I., Kansas. 

Mildred Scott, 4708 Springfield Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 
*Francis P. Sharpless, West Chester, Pa. 
*Lester B. Shoemaker, Tullytown, Pa. 

B. Clyde Shore, Yadkinville, N. C. 

Marvin H. Shore, Yadkinville, N. C. 

Arthur Shrigley, 603 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 

Edward A. Sibley, 811 Westview Ave., Germantown, Pa. 

Gertrude E. Simms, 405 2nd Nat'l Bank Bldg., Richmond, Ind. 
*A. Clark Smith, Greenleaf, Idaho. 
*Alan G. Smith, 6490 Woodbine Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 

James B. Smith, Jr., Eureka, New York. 
*Ralph P. Smith, Clayton, Del. 
*Walter E. Smith, Eureka, New York. 

Walter H. Smith, Metamora, Illinois. 

Warren M. Smith, Gibson, Iowa. 

Vernon Smucker, Orville, Ohio. 

Ralph W. Suavely, Landisville, Pa. 

Donald B. Snyder, R. D. 3, Wabash, Indiana. 

Guy W. Solt, Central City, Nebraska. 

Charles E. Sommer, 10905 Lee Ave., Cleveland, Ohio. 

Albert J. Sommer, Metamora, 111. 
* William B. South worth, 44 Edge Hill Rd., Brookline, Mass. 

Martha T. Speakman, Swarthmore, Pa. 
*John H. Speer, Jr., 308 Price St., West Chester, Pa. 

George 0. Springer, R. R. Metamora, 111. 

Henry Stabler, Fairfax, Virginia. 

Ernest I. Stahly, Middlebury, Indiana. 

Alfred E. Standing, Earlham, Iowa. 



280 APPENDIX 

Arthur C. Standing, Earlham, Iowa. 

James G. Stanislawsky, 3064 Lynde St., Oakland, Cal. 

James W. Steer, Winona, Ohio. 

I. Thomas Steere, Haverford, Pa. 

Kobert M. Stemen, K. No. 7, Lima, Ohio. 
*D. Owen Stephens, Moylan, Pa. 

Walter C. Stephens, 415 W. Howard St., Muncie, Ind. 

Eli Stoltzfus, 825 N. Jefferson St., Lima, Ohio. 

Mahlon C. Stouffer, Rittman, Ohio. 
*Henry B. Strater, Louisville, Ky. 

Mabel R. Sturgis, 63 Beacon St., Boston, Mass. 

J. Emel Swanson, 7827 62nd Ave., S. E., Portland, Ore. 



*Lester Taggart, Charlevoix, Michigan. 

Harry E. Tamplin, 5322 82nd St., Portland, Oregon. 

Ashton R. Tatnall, Jr., Center & Chestnut, Redlands, Cal. 

David S. Tatum, 322 W. Randolph St., Chicago, 111. 

Oliver P. Tatum, 6 Park Road, Llanerch, Pa. 

Dr. Marianna Taylor, St. Davids, Pa. 

Charles M, Teague, 10 Church St., Gonic, N. H. 

Harvey S. Thatcher, Utica, Ohio. 

Alice B. Thomas, Moses Brown School, Providence, R. I. 

Bevan W. Thomas, 409 N. Bright Ave., Whittier, Cal. 

Cleaver S. Thomas, 1149 Potter St., Chester, Pa. 
*L. Ralston Thomas, Moses Brown School, Providence, R. I. 

Walter E. Thomasson, 912 Villa, Pasadena, Cal. 

Russell W. Thornburg, Urbana, Ohio. 

Arthur G. Thorp, 404 W. State St., Media, Pa. 

James Thorp, Media, Pa. 
*William C. Titcomb, 66 Stone St., Augusta, Maine. 

Morris N. Tomlinson, Westfield, Indiana. 

Frederick O. Tostenson, Le Grande, Iowa. 

James O. Tow, R. R. 10, Columbia, Mo. 

Augusta Townsend, 15 Innes Ave., Poughkeepsie, N. Y. 
*J. Coleman Traviss, 5 Holmes St., Poughkeepsie, N. Y. 

Clay A. C. Treadway, Macksville, Kansas. 

Harold M. Tucker, Nampa, Idaho. 

U 

Byron E. Underwood, Jr., 2041 Francisco St., Berkeley, Cal. 
Leigh R. Urban, No. Brookfield, Mass. 



APPENDIX 281 

*Alfred C. Vail, 23rd and Howard Sts., Chester, Pa. 

Edwin H. Vail, 333 Channing Ave., Palo Alto, Cal. 

Ito Van Giesen, 340 N, Millwood Ave., Wichita, Kansas. 
*Arend M. Vlaskamp, 1530 W. 7th St., Muncie, Ind. 

Stephen Vlaskamp, 1530 W. 7th St., Muncie, Ind, 

Ernest N. Votaw, 20 Rigby Ave., Lansdowne, Pa. 

W 

Leroy G. Waggener, Central City, Nebraska. 

Dorothy Walton, 802 Mt. Curve Ave., Minneapolis, Minn. 

Alfred R. Ware, Worcester, Mass. 

Willard H. Ware, Worcester, Mass. 
*Luther E. Warren, Wilmington, Ohio. 

Robert F. Way, Central City, Neb. 
*William Webb, West Chester, Pa. 
*Edward L. Webster, 4830 Penn St., Frankford, Philadelphia, Pa. 

John W. Weightman, Jr., 2823 E. 4th St., Los Angeles, Cal. 

William B. Weightman, 2823 E. 4th St., Los Angeles, Cal. 

Ethelynde Weil, 212 W. Washington Square, Philadelphia, Pa. 

George R. Wells, 1028 6th St., S. E., Minneapolis., Minn. 

Alfred E. Wetherald, Bryantown, Maryland. 

* William H. B. Whitall, 512 Church Lane, Germantown, Philadelphia, 
Pa. 

Frances M. White, Cardington, Pa. 
*Headley S. White, Langhorne, Pa. 

Paul L. Whitely, R. F. D. 21, Fairmount, Indiana. 

Ralph E. W^hitely, Milton, Indiana. 

Charles L. Whitney, 312 Camden Rd., London. 

T. Barclay Whitson, Moylan, Pa. 

George H. Wild, 28 Chaloner St., Fall River, Mass. 

Walter E. Wildman, Selma, Ohio. 

Jonathan G. Williams, 514 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, Cal. 

L. Griswold Williams, 66 Willets Ave., New London, Conn. 

Clarence C. Willits, Urbana, Ohio. 

Charles D. Winslow, R. 1, Carthage, Indiana. 

Earle M. Winslow, Marshalltown, Iowa. 

J. Raymond Winslow, Marshalltown, Iowa 

Leonard F. Winslow, George, N. C. 

John C. Winston, Jr., 832 Stillman Ave., Redlands, Cal. 

Gerald H. Wood, Central College, Central City, Neb. 

Raymond V. Wood, 289 Jackson St., Lawrence, Masa. 

Richard R. Wood, Riverton, N. J. 

Roy C. Woods, 301 "K" Ave., Oskaloosa, Iowa. 



282 APPENDIX 

Edward N. Wright, Moylan, Pa. 
Lester B. Wright, Newberg, Oregon. 
Noah V. Wright, Farmland, Indiana. 



Floyd Yoder, Shipshewana, Indiana. 
Solomon E. Yoder, R. D. 1, Bellville, Pa. 
Wilmer J. Young, Springville, Iowa. 



J. Thompson Zachary, Snow Camp, N. C. 
^Edwin C. Zavitz, Coldstream, Ontario, Can. 
John S. Zimmerman, Ronks, Pa. 
*John D. Zook, care of Charleston Mail, Charleston, W. Va. 



APPENDIX B 
Equipes and Centers of Work in France 



Abbeville 

Apremont 

Arcis-sur-Aube 

Attigny (Ardennes) 

Aubr6ville 

Auz6ville 

Avocourt 

Bar-le-Duc (Meuse) 

Bar-8ur-Aube 

Beauchamps 

Besancon (Doubs) 

Bettancourt (Marne) 

Blesme (Marne) 

Brabant-en-Argonne 

Boureuilles ( Meuse ) 

Brizeaux 

Buzancy (Ardennes) 

Chalons (Marne) 

Champlat ( Marne ) 

Charmont (Marne) 

Chatel Ch6li6ry 

Chatillon 

Chavanges ( Aube ) 

Cheppy 

Chevieres ( Ardennes ) 

Cierges 

Clermont-en-Argonne 

Compiegne ( Oise ) 

Cuchery ( Marne ) 

Courcelles (Meuse) 

Dole-du-Jura 

Dombasle-en-Argonne 

Dun-sur-Meuse 

Eaux Bonnes (Basses 



Esmery-Hallon (Somme) 
Esnes 

Evian-les- Bains 
Evres (Meuse) 
Exermont 

Fl^ville (Ardennes) 
Foreste 
Fromer^ville 
Givry-en-Argonne 
Golancourt 
Gondrecourt (Meuse) 
Grandpre (Ardennes) 
Grange-le-Compte (Meuse) 
Gruny 

Ham (Somme) 
Issoncourt 
Jubecourt (Meuse) 
La Chalade (Meuse) 
Lapalisse (Allier) 
La Val 

Le Neufour (Meuse) 
Les Islettes (Meuse) 
Les Senades (Meuse) 
Li6ge (Belgiimi) 
Lisieux 
Locheres 
Louviers (Eure) 
Limeville 
Lyons 
Malabry 

Marcq (c/o Grange-le-Compte) 
Mareuil-le-Port (Marne) 
Marseille 
Pyrenees) Mery-sur-Seine (Aube) 
283 



284 



APPENDIX 



Montblainville 
Montceau-les-Mines 
Montfaucon 
Moulins 

Mouzon (Ardennes) 
Nettancourt 
Neuvilly (Meuse) 
Ornans (Doubs) 
Pargny-les-Reims (Marne) 
Paris, 53, Rue de Rivoli 
4, Rue Chevreux 

85, Rue de Sevres 

27, Rue Boullainvillier, Passy 
Plessis-Piquet 
Pompadour, Correze 
Rattentout (Meuse) 
Recicourt (Meuse) 
Rheiras 
Romilly (Seine) 



Samoens (Haute Savoie) 

Sermaize (Marne) 

Sommerance (Ardennes) 

Souhesmes (Meuse) 

St. Etienne 

St. Jurin (Meuse) 

Ste. Menehould (Marne) 

St. Remy 

Troyes (Aube) 

Varennes (Meuso) 

Venault-les-Dames (Marne) 

Verdun (Aieuse) 

Verneuil (Marne) 

V6ry (Meuse) 

Vierzon 

Ville-en-Tardenpis (Marne) 

Villers-sous-Chatillon (Marne) 

Vitry-le-Francois ( Marne ) 

Violaine (Marne) 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



